Modula-3 History Collection on Computer History Museum

softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org

35 points·pjmlp··5 comments

Modula 3 is a missed gem to me. Turbo Pascal was still a thing and C/C++ became popular and it was kind of missed that there was a new language that provided many things that were popular at the time: OOP, or quite new: garbage collection plus lots of free documentation. Computer books were very expensive.

I tried it recently and discovered that it also came with a multi-platform (Windows/Unix) GUI/Graphics library called Trestle.

https://modula3.github.io/cm3/src_reports/src-069.pdf

This GUI library from the beginning of the 90th still works :-D

Thanks for sharing. Hadn't seen that particular presentation of binary splits before.

I must confess, I previously hadn't read much about it as it was not from or by Wirth himself, but on consideration, perhaps that was unfair and premature.

I had to learn Modula-2 at Uni. It was useful for teaching core concepts, but very limited use in terms of finding a job. I think it was only defence companies that used it.

Object Pascal stolen its thunder, with Apple, Borland, and those that had a little stint at it, like TMT, Microsoft, Rem Objects, and a few others.

The guy behind Scala, started his career on the short lived Turbo Modula-2 for Borland.

Also even with programming editors auto formatting, having capitalised keywords was a put off for many folks.

Ironically GCC merged GNU Modula-2 during last year into its official frontends.

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