Modula-2

Modula-2 is a computer programming language designed and developed between 1977 and 1985 by Niklaus Wirth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) as a revision of Pascal to serve as the sole programming language for the operating system and application software for the personal workstation Lilith. The principal concepts were: Modula-2 is a computer programming language designed and developed between 1977 and 1985 by Niklaus Wirth at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) as a revision of Pascal to serve as the sole programming language for the operating system and application software for the personal workstation Lilith. The principal concepts were: Wirth viewed Modula-2 as a successor to his earlier programming languages Pascal and Modula. The language design was also influenced by the Mesa language and the new programming possibilities of the early personal computer Xerox Alto, both from Xerox, that Wirth saw during his 1976 sabbatical year at Xerox PARC. The computer magazine BYTE devoted the August 1984 issue to the language and its surrounding environment. Modula-2 is a general purpose procedural language, sufficiently flexible to do systems programming, but with much broader application. In particular, it was designed to support separate compilation and data abstraction in a straightforward way. Much of the syntax is based on Wirth's earlier and better-known language, Pascal. Modula-2 was designed to be broadly similar to Pascal, with some elements and syntactic ambiguities removed and the important addition of the module concept, and direct language support for multiprogramming. The language allows compilation in a single pass, and in a compiler of Gutknecht and Wirth was about four times faster than earlier multi-pass compilers.