Lilith and Modula-2 | Hacker News Reader

Lilith and Modula-2

astrobe.com

65 pointskristianp10 comments

An Emulith page[1] has a Lilith hardware manual[2]. There's a brief Comdex Emulith demo.[3]

[1] http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/lilith/emulith/ [2] http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/lilith/docu/Lilith_hardw... (pdf; 20 MB) [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc

Simultaneously on the front page, Oberon Pi[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885478

After self teaching myself BASIC and Pascal as a kid, Modula-2 was the language we first learnt at university in order to teach us programming fundamentals. It was a nice move from Pascal for me but I preferred Delphi.

Although the keywords in Modula-2 weren’t case sensitive and weren’t required to be in upper case, it was preferred (guidance from Niklaus Wirth) and that was just annoying.

Modula-2 didn't had OOP as standard feature, although some compilers did use Modula-3 classes as extension, like XDS.

Was this the case or something else?

Always looking to improve my knowledge on Wirthian languages.

I think it’s more likely I’m misremembering. It is now over 30 years ago.

Next on the list at university was C++, so more than likely my brain is deliberately blocking out that language. :-)

I started programming with Modula-2 and I really believe it was case sensitive. In fact I remember the book I used to learn it (Ogilvie) mentioning the case sensitiveness as a peculiarity of the language: "if case matters in natural languages, why programming languages should ignore it"

It is, as do all C derived languages.

After Pascal, all languages that Niklaus Wirth created were case sensitive.

Uppercase keywords are debatable as a style, however with good IDE tooling hardly an issue.

Similarly to BASIC and SQL, or spaces in ML languages and Python, don't use Notepad like editors for them, use something with autoformatter.

Pity that in Modula-2 case those products are long gone, and I doubt many would bother with a VSCode extension or something.

There is a VSCode extension for syntax highlighting in Modula-2: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=redstar....

Yes, I guess it could be a starting point for automatic formating as well.

I took a similar path -- BASIC at home, Turbo Pascal in highschool, Modula-2 in college. Our prof had learned under Wirth and wanted us to use Modula-2 a lot more than we wanted to.

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