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By R. S. Doiel, 2020-06-20
This is the ninth post in the Mostly Oberon[1] series. Mostly Oberon documents my exploration of the Oberon Language, Oberon System and the various rabbit holes I will inevitably fall into.
1: ../../04/11/Mostly-Oberon.html
Oberon-07 supports the passing of procedures as parameters in a procedure. Let's create a module name Noises.Mod[2] to explore this.
The key to supporting this is Oberon's type system. We need to decide what our generic procedure will look like first. In our case our procedures that will display an animal noise will include the name of the animal speaking. We'll call this type of procedure "Noise". It'll accept an ARRAY OF CHAR for the name as a parameter then use the standard Out module to display the animal name and noise they make.
TYPE
Noise = PROCEDURE (who : ARRAY OF CHAR);
The two "Noise" procedures will be "BarkBark" and "ChirpChirp". They will implement the same parameter signature as describe in the "Noise" type.
PROCEDURE BarkBark(who : ARRAY OF CHAR);
BEGIN
Out.String(who);
Out.String(": Bark, bark");Out.Ln();
END BarkBark;
PROCEDURE ChirpChirp(who : ARRAY OF CHAR);
BEGIN
Out.String(who);
Out.String(": Chirp, chirp");Out.Ln();
END ChirpChirp;
We'll also create a procedure, MakeNoise, that accepts the animal name and our "Noise" procedure name and it'll call the "Noise" type procedure passing in the animal name.
PROCEDURE MakeNoise(name : ARRAY OF CHAR; noise : Noise);
BEGIN
(* Call noise with the animal name *)
noise(name);
END MakeNoise;
If we invoke MakeNoise with our animal name and pass the name of the procedure we want to do the MakeNoise procedure will generate our noise output. Here' is what is looks like all together.
MODULE Noises;
IMPORT Out;
TYPE
Noise = PROCEDURE(who : ARRAY OF CHAR);
PROCEDURE BarkBark(who : ARRAY OF CHAR);
BEGIN
Out.String(who);
Out.String(": Bark, bark");Out.Ln();
END BarkBark;
PROCEDURE ChirpChirp(who : ARRAY OF CHAR);
BEGIN
Out.String(who);
Out.String(": Chirp, chirp");Out.Ln();
END ChirpChirp;
PROCEDURE MakeNoise(name : ARRAY OF CHAR; noise : Noise);
BEGIN
(* Call noise with the animal name *)
noise(name);
END MakeNoise;
BEGIN
MakeNoise("Fido", BarkBark);
MakeNoise("Tweety", ChirpChirp);
MakeNoise("Fido", ChirpChirp);
MakeNoise("Tweety", BarkBark);
END Noises.
Note when we pass the procedures we include their name without parenthesis. Our type definition tells the compiler that the procedure can be a parameter, any procedure with the same signature, e.g. who : ARRAY OF CHAR as the only parameter will be treated as a "Noise" type procedures.