Reference articles on history, science, culture and more
Encyclopedia

Modula

Programming language

The Modula programming language is a descendant of the Pascal language. It was developed in Switzerland, at ETH Zurich, in the mid-1970s by Niklaus Wirth, the same person who designed Pascal. The main innovation of Modula over Pascal is a module system, used for grouping sets of related declarations into program units; hence the name Modula. The language is defined in a report by Wirth called Modula. A language for modular multiprogramming published 1976.

Modula was first implemented by Wirth on a PDP-11. Very soon, other implementations followed, most importantly, the compilers developed for University of York Modula, and one at Philips Laboratories named PL Modula, which generated code for the LSI-11 microprocessor.

The development of Modula was discontinued soon after its publication. Wirth then concentrated his efforts on Modula's successor, Modula-2.

Watch videos about ModulaExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Modula, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.