Preserving Modula-3: A Historical Archive at the Computer History Museum
Modula-3 History Collection on Computer History Museum
I have curated a comprehensive collection of documents, source code, and materials detailing the birth and evolution of the Modula-3 programming language. This archive honors the designers from Digital Equipment Corporation and Olivetti Research, capturing the language's journey from its 1980s inception to its various implementations. By preserving these artifacts, we ensure that the innovative concepts of safety, efficiency, and simplicity pioneered by Modula-3 remain accessible for future study.
Safety means the runtime state of a program is guaranteed to be faithful to the language semantics.
- MarcusE1W
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
- lproven
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.
- gadders
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.