Critical Mass JVM : Modula - 3 Befriends Java

s/src-tn-1997-009.html [3] Edsger W. Dijkstra. A Discipline of Programming, Pren-tice-Hall, Inc., 1976. [4] J. A. Robinson. “A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on theResolution Principle,” in Journal of the ACM, Vol. 12, No. 1,pgs 23-41, January, 1965. [5] Greg Nelson. Techniques for Program Verification, Tech-nical Report CSL-81-10, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,June, 1981. http://www.parc.xerox.com/parc-go.htmlModula-3 in Academia Department of Computer Science, III Aachen University of Technology, Germany Peter Klein, Lehrstuhl für Informatik III The Department of Computer Science III is one of thethirteen departments comprising the computer sci-ence group at the Aachen University of Technology.Started by Professor M. Nagl, the main research topicsof the department are methods, languages, and toolsfor software engineering. Like many other computer science departments, wefavored Modula-2 in the eighties as the main pro-gramming language for teaching and project imple-mentation. In the early nineties, our dissatisfactionwith Modula-2 grew because of its missing supportfor modern programming concepts like objects,genericity, garbage collection, and exception han-dling. On the practical side, it was also becomingincreasingly difficult to find a Modula-2 environ-ment that was suitable for our implementations(approaching 500K lines of code at that time.) It took us some time to reach agreement on a replace-ment for Modula-2. Although Modula-3 seemed a nat-ural choice, our experience with Modula-2 suggestedusing a more well-known programming language. Assuch, different subprojects started out in C, C++, andModula-3, which allowed us to recognize that thecompactness and clarity of Modula-3 allowed us toproduce more robust and reusable code. This factorproved to be an essential point in our academic set-ting: with a high fluctuation of rather inexperiencedprogrammers, a major part of the implementation ofour systems are done by student workers or in thecourse of diploma theses.