Building Your Own Tools: An Oberon Industrial Case-Study

Abstract

Our experience creating custom application software has taught us that total control over our development tools is a necessity. Project Oberon provided an excellent starting point for us to build our own cross-platform application programming environment. Our adaptation of Wirth’s compiler is retargetable at run-time via a small set of installable up-calls, enabling a single machine-specific code-generation module of typically less than a thousand lines of code. The only significant additions to the original Oberon language are floating-point binary-coded decimals and open-array variables with string concatenation (e.g. s := ”Error: ” + t). Accompanying run-time libraries, written in Oberon, for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows (32-bit) and MS-DOS have been developed. Several systems created using the new tools have been in use by customers for some time.