To me it sounds like you and the other person were saying that Pascal and Oberon weren't "large enough". I'm just pointing out that they were large enough that people can and did do serious work with them, and that, in many ways, our modern systems aren't that much better than what they achieved with those relatively simple and primitive tools. They weren't perfect, both languages grew and became more elaborate, that's true, but the original systems were solid.
You're welcome. I don't look at usernames on HN so it didn't occur to me until now that it's your project. It really does seem like a well-considered extension of Oberon, I'm going to check it out in more depth later.
> The argument was, that Wirth's original language designs were less successful than the extended versions designed by others, e.g. Boarland.
In a sense, the extensions of his work are the success, eh?
> The original designs are undoubtedly sufficiently expressive to build things of decent size, but apparently too little attractive for wide adoption.
In the quote from the interview with Wirth he says "I think the industry thinks it’s a big asset to have a complex thing that increases their reputation of being sophisticated." So rather than a curing a lack of expressivity, complexity instead provides a marketing edge, in his opinion.
> Not surprisingly, variants of all Wirth languages have quickly emerged
Again, to me that seems like a kind of success. The alternatives are that Wirth birthed perfect languages, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, or that they were all barren and died on the vine.
His focus was educating students at ETH; the languages he created with this focus were fit for purpose; it is true that there are developers in industry who prefer complex languages for sophistication reasons; but there are also pragmatic people; even they apparently prefer Delphi over Pascal; I don't consider Delphi complex e.g. in comparison with C++11.
> to me that seems like a kind of success
Agree; the original languages are great and a robust basis; and e.g. Go is a very successful offspring of Oberon-2.
I don't like that Oberon+ removed uppercase requirement for the keywords. While I too found the uppercase requirement to be weird initially, I have now come to appreciate the sentiment behind it - it does make it easy to read and review the Oberon code. Just like Python uses indentation to increase readability, the uppercase keywords were a good defining feature of the original Oberon, and shouldn't have been removed. After all, now that modern editors can automatically make the keywords uppercase, programmers don't really have any reason to complain about it. It's a simple usability trick that doesn't rely on colours or font size or weight to increase readability. (One can also argue that if you want to remove that as a language feature, why stop there - why not also remove BEGIN and END and replace that with brackets or something else?).