The School of Wirth

When I read this book I had an hard time running and compiling the source code included. If you want to read the book and try out the example compiler (oberon0), you can follow the instructions here: https://github.com/lboasso/oberon0. You just need a JVM >= 8 and the oberonc compiler: https://github.com/lboasso/oberonc

Second this. Much easier to follow than the dragon book. And you’ll end up with a better implementation if you follow Wirth vs the YACC dudes.

Ada was a real bear of a language. When it was introduced as the language of instruction in some class at UIC back in the 80s, students had to work on teams as a single compilation was enough to consume the weekly CPU time allocation for a student account on the VM/CMS mainframe. They had to set up file sharing between accounts and move to a new account with each new day's login. I think there were a few cases where students ran out of CPU time even with pooled accounts before they could complete an assignment.

One of the nice things about Oberon-07 is that the compiler I’ve played with could compile itself and the standard library all in a tiny fraction of a second.

Note that before Oberon-7 happened, after Oberon came Oberon-2, Component Pascal, Active Oberon and Zonnon.

Although Wirth seems to only have been involved with Oberon-2 and Component Pascal.

I'd say it is because Turbo Pascal and then Borland Pascal got popular enough, and had TurboVision and other stuff.

Modula-2 was a nice language (and modern Go is built basically on its ideas, plus Oberon's), but it had a hard time competing for the same niche on the PC. It worked better in embedded space, though.

On Unix, there was C, a language with many shortcomings, but one big upside: it was the language the kernel and the userland was implemented in. Its compiler was readily available as a part if any Unix installation. It seemed a natural choice over Pascal, unless you wanted drastically different features (then you had Fortran, or awk, or Tcl, or later Perl, etc.)

Having loved Pascal and struggled with Modula 2, I'll go out on a limb and I'll say: for cosmetic and typing issues.

Modula 2, at least in the implementation I had to use at my University, had case-sensitive keywords which were in UPPERCASE. Compared to Pascal's case-insensitive keywords, in the editors available at that time, Modula 2 stuck out like a sore thumb and made writing and reading code like a chore.

When I started grad school, in 1986, I'd written a lot of Pascal and used Turbo Pascal on my PC. But the school used Sun workstations with unix, so I had to learn C pretty quickly. Nobody seemed to use Pascal. There was a Modula II compiler around, but it was a resource hog and never popular. Oberon was published about the same time. I thought it was pretty cool and worked on a compiler for it, though the language evolved out from under me. My impression is that none of the Wirth languages made much of an impression in any of the US grad schools in that era. Of course, I didn't see everything that was going on, but I saw most of the compiler work. Almost 100% in C, moving eventually to C++.

Because Turbo Pascal already had modules.