Instead, it is a minor variant and refinement of Oberon-2 with a more expressive type system and built-in string support.
At the time, 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 Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML), which was released in 2008.
An open-source software implementation of Component Pascal exists for the .NET and Java virtual machine (JVM) 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.