Modula2 is NicolasWirth's attempt at a systems ProgrammingLanguage done right, the more serious successor to Pascal. It lost popularity to C and TurboPascal in the early 80's. TurboPascal had a very good, cheap compiler in DOS systems, and quickly evolved into a very similar language. C was just there already on Unix systems, and Modula2 lacked something resembling C's preprocessor, though in fact it is probably a strong point that the language has built-in syntax for everything the preprocessor is commonly used for in C. The language was later superseded by Oberon, which added ObjectOrientation and GarbageCollection.

Modula2 is much more strict than C, so it can prevent many accidental buffer overflows, but also feels much more pedantic. All type conversions must be done explicitly and KEYWORDS must be WRITTEN in CAPITAL LETTERS. Some WLUGer fondly remembers it like this: ...a very fascist language they forced us to learn at CanterburyUniversity. It has very strict typing rules, but it does teach you structured programming, I suppose.

CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryImperativeProgrammingLanguages, CategoryMachineOrientedProgrammingLanguages, CategorySystemsProgrammingLanguages