The Oberon System (V4)

Oberon is a modern version of Pascal. It was designed by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht at ETH Zurich starting in 1986. Oberon is both:

  • a programming language supporting modules with separate compilation, strong type checking, interface checking and object-orientation. Its definition is concise and clean so that it is perfectly suitable for programming education. The current version of the language is Oberon-2.


  • a programming environment supporting garbage collection, dynamic module loading with version checking as well as commands (interactive entry points into modules). It comes with a variety of tools for program development, text and graphics processing, internet connectivity, etc.

Oberon is available with full source code via ftp. There are implementations for almost all platforms including Windows 95/NT, MacOS, Unix (SparcStation, DECstation, RS6000, HP workstations, Silicon Graphics), Linux, and Amiga. These implementations are source-code compatible with each other and share the same document architecture.

Oberon Books

  • N. Wirth and M. Reiser: Programming in Oberon. Steps beyond Pascal and Modula-2. Addison-Wesley, 1992, ISBN 0-201-56543-9. Tutorial for the Oberon programming language and concise language reference.


  • M. Reiser: The Oberon System. User Guide and Programmer's Manual. Addison Wesley, 1991, ISBN 0-201-54422-9. User manual for the programming environment and reference for the standard module library.


  • N. Wirth and J. Gutknecht: Project Oberon. The Design of an Operating System and Compiler. Addison Wesley, 1992, ISBN 0-201-54428-8. Program listings with explanations for the whole Oberon system, including the compiler for NS32000.


  • H. Mössenböck: Object-Oriented Programming in Oberon-2. Springer-Verlag, 1993. Foundations and applications of OOP with a case study (mini Oberon system) in source code. ISBN 3-540-55690-7.
    3rd German edition (completely revised), Springer-Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-540-64649-3


  • J. Mühlbacher, B. Leisch, B.Kirk, U. Kreuzeder: Oberon-2: Programming with Windows. Springer-Verlag, 1997. ISBN 3-540-62522-4. Besides a thorough introduction to Oberon-2 this book describes the Pow! system developed by the authors for the Windows operating system.


  • E. W. Nikitin: Into the Realm of Oberon. An introduction to programming and the Oberon-2 programming language. Springer-Verlag 1998, ISBN 0-387-98279-5.


Oberon Papers and other Online Material

Public Domain Software

How to get Oberon

Most Oberon versions are on the ETH server. The PowerMacintosh version, the Linux version, and a somewhat improved version for Windows and Macintosh are on the Linz server.


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