Editing Modula-3 (section)

==Historical development==
The Modula-3 project started in November 1986 when [[Maurice Wilkes]] wrote to [[Niklaus Wirth]] with some ideas for a new version of Modula. Wilkes had been working at DEC just prior to this point, and had returned to England and joined Olivetti's Research Strategy Board. Wirth had already moved on to [[Oberon (programming language)|Oberon]], but had no problems with Wilkes's team continuing development under the Modula name. The language definition was completed in August 1988, and an updated version in January 1989. Compilers from DEC and Olivetti soon followed, and 3rd party implementations after that.

Its design was heavily influenced by work on the [[Modula-2+]] language in use at SRC and at the [[Acorn Computers]] Research Center (ARC, later ORC when Olivetti [[Takeover|acquired]] Acorn) at the time, which was the language in which the operating system for the [[DEC Firefly]] multiprocessor [[VAX]] workstation was written and in which the Acorn Compiler for Acorn C and Modula Execution Library (CAMEL) at ARC for the [[ARX (operating system)|ARX]] operating system project of [[ARM architecture|ARM]] based [[Acorn Archimedes]] range of computers was written. As the revised Modula-3 Report states, the language was influenced by other languages such as [[Mesa (programming language)|Mesa]], [[Cedar (programming language)|Cedar]], [[Object Pascal]], [[Oberon (programming language)|Oberon]] and [[Euclid (programming language)|Euclid]].<ref name=DecSrcRr052>[http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-52.html Modula-3 report (revised)] Luca Cardelli, James Donahue, Lucille Glassman, Mick Jordan, Bill Kalsow, Greg Nelson. [[DEC Systems Research Center]] (SRC) Research Report 52 (November 1989)</ref>

During the 1990s, Modula-3 gained considerable currency as a teaching language, but it was never widely adopted for industrial use. Contributing to this may have been the demise of DEC, a key Modula-3 supporter (especially when it ceased to maintain it effectively before DEC was sold to [[Compaq]] in 1998). In any case, in spite of Modula-3's simplicity and power, it appears that there was little demand for a procedural [[compiled language]] with restricted implementation of [[object-oriented programming]]. For a time, a commercial [[compiler]] named CM3 maintained by one of the chief implementors prior at DEC SRC who was hired before DEC being sold to [[Compaq]], an [[integrated development environment]] (IDE) named Reactor and an extensible [[Java virtual machine]] (licensed in [[binary code]] and [[source code]] formats and buildable with Reactor) were offered by Critical Mass, Inc., but that company ceased active operations in 2000 and gave some of the source code of its products to {{not a typo|elego}} Software Solutions GmbH. Modula-3 is now taught in universities mostly in comparative programming language courses, and its textbooks are out of print. Essentially the only corporate supporter of Modula-3 is {{not a typo|elego}}, which inherited the sources from Critical Mass and has since made several releases of the CM3 system in source and binary code. The Reactor IDE has been open source released after several years it had not, with the new name CM3-IDE. In March 2002, {{not a typo|elego}} also took over the repository of another active Modula-3 distribution, PM3, until then maintained at the [[École Polytechnique de Montréal]] but which later continued by the work on HM3 improved over the years later until it was obsoleted.