Object-Oriented Programming in Oberon-2

Oberon-2 is a refined version of Oberon developed at ETH. It introduces type-bound procedures, read-only export of data, and open array variables. The For statement is reintroduced. This paper concentrates on type-bound procedures which make Oberon-2 an object-oriented language with dynamically-bound messages and strong type checking at compile time. Messages can also be sent as data packets (extensible records) that are passed to a handler procedure and are interpreted at run time. This is as flexible as the Smalltalk message dispatching mechanism. Objects carry type information at run time which allows dynamic binding of messages, run time type tests, and the implementation of persistent objects. Oberon-2 is available on various machines.