Modula-3 History Collection on Computer History Museum
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- Modula-3 was designed in the late 1980s by Luca Cardelli, Jim Donahue, Mick Jordan, Bill Kalsow, and Greg Nelson, aiming to be safe and efficient for systems and application programming.
- Key features included interfaces, objects, generics, threads, isolation of unsafe code, garbage collection, exceptions, and subtyping, many of which were ahead of their time.
- The language originated from Modula-2+ and was refined through several revisions, with the definitive book 'Systems Programming with Modula-3' published in 1991.
- Two main implementations existed: Olivetti Modula-3 (short-lived) and DEC SRC Modula-3, which became the basis for all later distributions.
- Subsequent distributions included CM3, PM3, Cambridge Modula-3, and EZM3, with maintenance later taken over by Elego and then moved to GitHub.
- Modula-3 was used in significant projects such as the SPIN extensible operating system, CVSup version control tool, persistent object stores, and distributed virtual environments like COTERIE.
- The language's influence persisted through its concepts and the annotated archive maintained by editor Paul McJones.