Why Modula-2

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2 total messages Started by Robert L Barton Tue, 06 Feb 1996 16:10

#3251

Author: Robert L Barton
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 1996 16:10

13 lines
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  Why Modula-2 rather than Oberon or Modula-3?
Oberon has a couple points which would have been nice
to incorporate into ISO M-2 (using a hex number with
suffix X for characters rather than octal with suffix B,
and allowing POINTER TO ARRAY OF CHAR).  But apart from that
Oberon is an inferior notation and a real step backwards.
  Modula-3 on the other hand improves on both M-2 and Oberon.
The format for numeric constants is much nicer (even C has a
better system here than M-2 and Oberon).  But as mentioned, M-2
is much more widely available than M-3.  Modula-2 also has an
ISO standard, although it has major problems in the area of I/O,
so people are continuing to use their old PIM modules until the
situation is fixed with a revised standard.

Re: Why Modula-2

#3286

Author: //
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 09:54

33 lines
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On 06 Feb 96  4:10 pm, r.barton8@genie.com (Robert L Barton) writes:
  >  But apart from that
  > 
Oberon is an inferior notation and a real step backwards.
  > 

I think you missed the point about Oberon. It was not meant to be a 
development platform for consumer or industrial applications. It was 
intended to be platfrom independent, object oriented, and running on a 
virtual machine. The idea was that you could truck home with code you 
compiled under oberon on your Sun Station at work and run it on your 
OS/2 or Linux PeeCee at home. Call it an academic excercise if you will.

What this makes possible is to distribute processing between normally 
incompatible machines. 

Now I am not saying Oberon is bad language, but you're criticising it 
for not being what it was not designed to be. 

It's also where Sun got its ideas for Java from, but Java is far more C 
like. Under the hood, it's quite similar. 

Cheers,

Jan

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