Oberon-2 (programming language)

Oberon-2 is an extension of the original Oberon programming language that adds limited reflection and object-oriented programming facilities, open arrays as pointer base types, read-only field export and reintroduces the FOR loop from Modula-2.

It was developed in 1991 at ETH Zurich by Niklaus Wirth and Hanspeter Mössenböck, who is now at Institut für Systemsoftware (SSW) of the University of Linz, Austria. Oberon-2 is a superset of Oberon, and is fully compatible with it. Oberon-2 was a redesign of Object Oberon.

Oberon-2 inherited limited reflection and single inheritance ("type extension") without interfaces or mixins from Oberon, but added efficient virtual methods ("type bound procedures"). Method calls were resolved at run-time using C++-style virtual method tables.

Compared to fully object-oriented programming languages like Smalltalk, in Oberon-2 basic types are not objects, classes are not objects, many operations are not methods, there is no message passing (to a certain extent it can be emulated by reflection and through message extension, as demonstrated in ETH Oberon), and polymorphism is limited to subclasses of a common class (no duck typing like in Python, and it's not possible to define interfaces like in Java). Oberon-2 does not support encapsulation at object/class level, but modules can be used for this purpose.