Component Pascal

Component Pascal is a programming language in the tradition of Niklaus Wirth's Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon and Oberon-2. It bears the name of the Pascal programming language but is incompatible with it. Instead, it is a minor variant and refinement of Oberon-2, designed and supported by a small ETH Zürich spin-off company called Oberon microsystems. Their IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is called BlackBox Component Builder. At the time the first version was released (1994 as Oberon/F) it presented a novel approach to graphical user interface (GUI) construction based on editable forms, where fields and command buttons are linked to exported variables and executable procedures. This approach bears some similarity to the code-behind way used in Microsoft's .NET 3.0 to access code in XAML.

An open-source implementation exists for the .NET and Java Virtual Machine platforms, from the Gardens Point team around John Gough at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

On 23 June 2004 Oberon microsystems announced that the BlackBox Component Builder was made available as a free download and that an open-source version was planned. The beta open-source version was initially released in December, 2004 and updated to a final v1.5 release in December, 2005. It includes the complete source code of the IDE, compiler, debugger, source analyser, profiler and interfacing libraries and can also be downloaded from their website. Several release candidates for v1.6 appeared in the years 2009 – 2011, the latest one (1.6rc6) appeared on Oberon microsystems web pages in 2011.

BlackBox Component Pascal uses the extensions .odc (= Oberon document) for document files, such as source files for example, and .osf (= Oberon symbol file) for symbol files while Gardens Point Component Pascal uses .cp for source and .cps for symbol files. BlackBox Component Pascal has its own executable and loadable object format .ocf (= Oberon code file); it includes a runtime linking loader for this format.