This paper presents an overview of the programming language Modula-3, and a more detailed description of its type system. 1

This paper presents an overview of the programming language Modula-3, and a more detailed description of its type system.

This paper presents an overview of the programming language Modula-3, and a more detailed description of its type system. 1 Introduction The design of the programming language Modula-3 was a joint effort by the Digital Systems Research Center and the Olivetti Research Center, undertaken with the guidance and inspiration of Niklaus Wirth. The language is defined by the Modula-3 Report [3], and is currently being implemented by the Olivetti Research Center. This paper gives an overview of the language, focusing primarily upon its type system. Modula-3 is a direct descendent of Mesa [8], Modula-2 [14], Cedar [5], and Modula-2+ [9, 10]. It also resembles its cousins Object Pascal [13], Oberon [15], and Euclid [6]. Since these languages already have more raw material than fits comfortably into a readable fifty-page language definition, which we were determined to produce, we didn't need to be inventive. On the contrary, we had to leave many good ideas out. Instead of exploring new featu...