Quote Originally Posted by dmantione
However, there are a few things that don't make it my favourite language, for example:
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* Uppercase keywords. Uppercasing keywords was form of manual syntax highlighting, however uppercase words reduce readability (try to read a software license with lots of capitals). Sincereadability of auto syntax highlighted code is so good nowadays, uppercase keywords are seriously outdated.
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* Explicit END keyword instead of begin/end. IMO a solution for a problem that doesn't exist in practise, and requires the introduction of an ugly ELSIF keyword.
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* I've had a go at Modula-2 and in there you also need uppercase keywords. I don't like it. You should be able to choose between upper- and lowercase keywords when you feel like it.

But to address your point about auto syntax highlighting: from what I see many text editors that appear in common use don't support Oberon-2 out of the box. At best I've seen the ConTEXT website that had a user-made downloadable .chl file, but even this is flawed.

I personally like Notepad++ but it has no auto support for Oberon-2, and manually making one is just annoying (even if the language is small).

* I like the END principle and ELSEIF keyword. Maybe that's because I've been fooling around with other languages so much it's just common to me. The BEGIN keyword to me just looks unnecessary, unless it's the beginning of a program.


I personally would give Oberon-2 a try, and it looks like a natural modern development from the old Pascal and others. Reduction of the whole language to make it more advanced in syntax and easier in use. It would also mean no more annoying IF-THEN-ELSE confusion and BEGIN-END verbosity to me (as I automatically try to simulate ELSEIF one way or another).

The more I see from it, the more I want to use it! I don't like the IMPORT keyword though. I prefer the word USES.