SAI Projects: Ulm's Oberon System

Todays programming languages are in many cases unnecessary complex and overloaded with features. Their reference manuals consume hundreds of pages and are more and more growing. An outstanding exception of this trend is the programming language Oberon which has been developed by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zürich in conjunction with the equally named operating system. Oberon is an example of a programming language which may be seen as a kernel which exports some basic abstractions and mechanisms only.

The goal of our research project is the development of a library which covers all those areas which are usually implemented by programming languages. Our current version of the library includes, for example, support for concurrency, synchronisation, persistence and distributed systems. All these mechanisms are based on system-independent abstractions.

Publications

Andreas Borchert, Library Design in Oberon: Streams, Coroutines, and Pipelines, Second International Modula-2 Conference, Loughborough University of Technology UK, pp 101-110, September 1991
Andreas Borchert, Object-Oriented Exception Handling in Oberon, published in Ulm's Oberon Reference, February 1994
Andreas Borchert, Zur Erweiterung von Programmiersprachen durch Bibliotheken: Konzeption und Realisierung der Ulmer Oberon-Bibliothek, Dissertation an der Universität Ulm, Mai 1994
Andreas Borchert, Die Ulmer Oberon-Bibliothek -- ein Neubeginn, unix/mail, Carl Hanser Verlag, S. 459-463, 12. Jahrgang, 5. Ausgabe, Oktober 1994
Andreas Borchert (Ed.), Ulm's Oberon System Reference, 5th Edition, April 1995. Most parts of this reference may be accessed online.
Martin Hasch, Nameserver- und Autorisierungsprotokolle für verteilte Systeme in Oberon, Diplomarbeit an der Universität Ulm, Juli 1996
Werner Stanglow, Konzeption und Implementierung von Objekt-Repositorien auf Basis der Ulmer Oberon-Bibliothek, Dissertation an der Universität Ulm, Januar 1996
Some diploma theses in german language are also available.

Ulm's Oberon Team

This project is headed by Andreas Borchert. Contributions (in alphabetical order) were made by:

Ralf Beck: Abstractions for ASCII terminal interfaces.
Detlef Birkholz: Initial implementation of PersistentObjects and PersistentDisciplines.
Oliver Engelhardt: Interface to Tcl/Tk.
Frank B.J. Fischer: Abstractions for random generators, primality tests, one-way hashes, and an implementation of a cryptographically secure random generator.
Till Franke: Shared memory based interprocess communication.
Martin Hasch:
- Lexical analysis and parser of the compiler
- Abstractions for distributed namespaces and authorization schemes.
Andreas Haupt: Initial implementation of an Oberon debugger.
Hansjörg Nägele: Implementation of a copying garbage collector.
Manfred Rueß: Abstractions for web objects.
Jan Oliver Stibane: Initial implementation of an abstraction for arguments.
Werner Stanglow: Abstractions and (partially) implementations of distributed transactions and object containers.
Michael Szczuka: Abstractions for cryptographic techniques and an implementation of TCRYPT.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the support of HDI Haftpflichtverband der Deutschen Industrie V.a.G. and its former board member Dr. Manfred Mücke. Sun Microsystems sponsered 1993 a workstation which was dedicated to this project.

Andreas Borchert, February 26th, 1999