Oberon in Python, ala Pyrex but instant compile?

[Janto Dreijer]

"Brad Clements" <bkc at Murkworks.com> wrote in message news:<3ce11bc3_4 at goliath.newsgroups.com>...

> Brainstorming..

> 

> Pyrex looks very nice. I'm wondering if it'd be possible to use an Oberon-2

> compiler as the backend instead of GCC.

> 

> The idea being that Oberon-2, on some (most?) OS's allows for very fast

> dynamic compilation and loading. The Oberon compiler could be a Python

> module that dynamically loads Pyrex "modules" and recompiles on the fly as

> needed.

> 

> I realize that dynamic loading is part of Oberon System, not really the

> Oberon compiler itself.

> 

> But I wondering if this is too crazy an idea or not. Have something like

> Pyrex write Oberon code, run it through an Oberon compiler and dynamically

> load the resulting module.

> 

> Oberon is much smaller than GCC and runs just about anywhere.

> 

> Crazy idea, or waste of time, or both?

> 

> --

> Novell DeveloperNet Sysop #5

> 


I know this is an old post, but I feel that Oberon programmers need
all the help they can get without being made fun of :-) If I remember
correctly you also asked about running python ON oberon, in a previous
post.

I believe I have some authority on this subject (or at least "will")
as we have just been given the taks of writing an interpreter for a
butchered version of python as a CS project. It has already taken me
8h just to write the scanner/tokeniser. That's extremely long for the
ammount of work involved. Most of the time was spent struggling with
oberon's absence of a string type, incomplete (and faulty!) oo
implementation and the oberon compiler(!) crashing with legal code.

Oberon's extremely strict and archaic design makes a complete and
bug-free interpreter almost impossible.

I could keep on ranting (just ask) about oberon's flaws and why such a
fork would actually waste a lot of development time that could have
been used for jyhton or cpython, but I'm sure that just browsing
oberon's internal libraries would dissuade even the most naive coder.
:-)

BTW If any of my fellow classmates post their versions I will kill
them <0.0001 wink>