I know. Modula-2 is not new. In fact, it’s pretty much another ‘dead language’ in computing.

Modula-2 was Nicholas Wirth’s second foray into computer programming languages, the first being the much more successful PASCAL.

So why learn (and write) Modula-2 instead of Pascal? Well, it’s simple. I hate Pascal.

I’ve hated Pascal ever since the Borland Turbo-Pascal came out and everyone in the programming community was shoving it down my throat in the mid-1980s. I was, at the time, working at a consulting firm writing and maintaining FORTRAN programs on IBM, VAX, CRAY and several other machines. I was hearing rumblings from the Unix community about this ‘thing’ called C, but was at that time still several years from venturing into C myself.

But this Turbo-Pascal was everywhere in the micro-computing community. You simply could not escape it. Worse, to me it seemed a dumb language; full of ‘:=’ and other arcane structural things that made little sense to a FORTRAN programmer.

I didn’t want to learn it, but the constant barrage of Pascal stuff was deafening.

Eventually I moved on to C programming, and Borland’s Turbo-C was wonderful for micro-computers. I went on to start my own consulting practice where C programming became my bread and butter for many years. After that I branched out to C++ and then Java, but I managed the entire time to ‘omit’ Pascal.

Now I’m back playing with Z80 computers and interested in learning ‘stuff’ for the fun of it. While looking around for the next ‘programming thing’ after FORTRAN (F77), PL/I and C for my Z80, I discovered a really great working Modula-2 compiler. It was complete. There was full documentation. There were (a very few) example programs. I was set.

The cool thing about the Modula-2 docs is there’s even a big section comparing differences between Modula-2 and Pascal. Funny, I still don’t miss Pascal.

But now Modula-2 is the ‘this week and/or month’ language, so on I go. I’ve already managed to covert one fairly simply PL/I program, and just today I managed to get it to read from, and write to files. Next I’ll try some more sophisticated programs just to see how it compares to the other languages I’ve been enjoying.