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This is part 15 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

What is Oxygene?

Oxygene is a commercial programming language developed by RemObjects Software for the Microsoft .NET Framework.  In 2008, RemObjects licensed its Oxygene compiler and IDE technology to Embarcadero to be used in its Delphi Prism product.  You may recall that in 2008 Embarcadero purchased CodeGear, the software development tools division of Borland.

Oxygene Design

The Oxygene programming language originated from Delphi and Object Pascal, but was designed to reflect the .NET programming paradigm and produce CLR-compliant assemblies.  Thus, Oxygene does not support all the language features from Object Pascal and Delphi, but it does leverage all the features and technologies provided by the .NET runtime.

New language features in Oxygene 3.0 include support for parallel programming, property notifications for the Model/View/Controller design pattern, nullable expressions, and improved QA analysis tools.

Oxygene History

RemObjects software came from a Delphi background.  In 2002, RemObjects sought to expand its developer libraries into the Microsoft .NET Framework, so naturally they considered Delphi for .NET for the job.  According to the RemObjects Chief Architect, it seemed like “Borland had developed Delphi for .NET with one main goal in mind: to hide the transition from Win32 to .NET from the developers.”  As a result, Delphi for .NET “introduced many Delphi-isms and Win32-isms that felt out of place and awkward in the .NET world.”  (source)

As a result, RemObjects chose to use C# for its .NET projects instead of Delphi.  But its engineers really missed the Pascal syntax, so eventually RemObjects decided to invent a language for .NET with the Pascal syntax, and Oxygene was born.  Its code name was Adrenochrome, which was later shortened to Chrome, and eventually renamed to Oxygene.

“Hello World” in Oxygene

implementation
 
class method ConsoleApp.Main;
begin
  // add your own code here
  Console.WriteLine('Hello World.');
end;
 
end.

References

• Oxygene Home Page
• Oxygene Features 
• Oxygene Manual
• DelphiPrism Home Page
• Oxygene on Wikipedia
• Interview with Oxygene Chief Architect

Article published on April 13, 2010

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