A language (and partly OS) specified by Niklaus Wirth.
Discussed on news:comp.lang.oberon
Possible connections to Pascal, Modula 2.
Not just possible. Oberon is the direct descendant of Modula-2, itself a direct descendant of Pascal, and is also the direct predecessor of Oberon-2, which was succeeded directly by Component Pascal.
Pascal was a strongly-typed structured language. It inherited the "begin...end" syntax from Algol.
Modula-2 added separate compilation and removed IO entirely. It used full control statement bracketing - if...then...end, while...do...end, etc.
Oberon added type extension. Oberon-2 added type-bound procedures making it truly object-oriented.
Component Pascal added the ability to deal with variables of different types without breaking the strong typing system. It is far better at dealing with a variable that may be any of several related or unrelated types.
It has been noted that Pascal was not only an improvement on earlier languages but on many later ones as well. Any of the above is still an improvement over C, and all but Pascal itself is still an improvement on Java.