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71 points susam | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.234s | source
1. wduquette ◴[] No.43683175[source]
Folks keep talking about how Modula-2 was released in 1978, to fix Pascal's defects. Well, yes, but.

I used Pascal a lot for about ten years starting in the late 70's: multiple flavors of UCSD Pascal, consecutive versions of Turbo Pascal, and VAX Pascal, on six distinct hardware platforms. Pascal was readily available for all of them; Modula-2 had no market share at all, so far as I could ever tell.

And market share is the right word: most compilers cost money in those days, sometimes quite a lot of money. Turbo Pascal took off because Borland sold it for $50, as opposed to something like $700 for Microsoft's compilers.

I wrote a letter to Borland International, asking if they were going to release a Turbo Modula-2, and was told yes. I'd have been first in line. It was never released.

So yeah, Modula-2 existed, technically, but it mostly wasn't relevant, at least not for microcomputer programmers.