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Pascal had a commercial ecosystem by the time Oberon came along.

And Oberon is austere where Pascal dialects grew all kinds of warts in the process of adding the features people asked for.

Wirth took away features in almost every iteration of developing his languages - you see this in almost every language he touched going back to the 60's and Algol-W.

It's been the guiding principle of most of his career to ruthlessly simplify.

The Oberon-07 language report is 17 pages.

Oberon takes more of an effort in following Wirth's mindset of addressing deficiencies by looking at how to make things simpler across the board (e.g. including for compiler writers) as opposed to the Pascal dialects which took the approach of addressing deficiencies by making things immediately easier for users to pick up, at the cost of additional complexity all over the place.




The CDC-6600 Pascal compiler from ETH had several small extensions in the same style as Turbo Pascal to integrate better with the underlying platform.

This is just to say that the culture of extensions/escape hatches didn't begin with Turbo Pascal.




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