SRC Research Report 52
SRC Research Report 52
Preface
The goal of Modula-3 is to be as simple and safe as it can be while meeting the needs of modern systems programmers. Instead of exploring new features, we studied the features from the Modula family of languages that have proven themselves in practice and tried to simplify them and fit them into a harmonious language. We found that most of the successful features were aimed at one of two main goals: greater robustness, and a simpler, more systematic type system.
Modula-3 descends from Mesa, Modula-2, Cedar, and Modula-2+. It also resembles its cousins Object Pascal, Oberon, and Euclid.
Modula-3 retains one of Modula-2's most successful features, the provision for explicit interfaces between modules. It adds objects and classes, exception handling, garbage collection, lightweight processes (or threads), and the isolation of unsafe features.
The Modula-3 report was published by Olivetti and Digital in August 1988. Implementation efforts followed shortly at both companies. In January 1989, the committee revised the language to reflect the experiences of these implementation teams. The main changes were the introduction of branded reference types, the requirement that opaque types be branded, the legalization of opaque supertypes, and the new flexibility in revealing information about an opaque type.
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