The Howdy Glossary

Modula-2 is a programming language that was designed for programming embedded systems and applications where reliability is important. It was created in the late 1970s by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich as an evolution of Pascal with new features to support modular programming. Modula-2 introduces the concept of modules, which are units of code that can be separately compiled and linked together into a program. This allows for better organization of large projects and helps to prevent namespace collisions while promoting software maintainability. The language has strong type checking and other safety features often required in mission-critical applications, making it easy to catch errors at compile time rather than during runtime execution. Despite its initial popularity, Modula-2's use has been largely replaced by more modern languages like C++ or Ada, which offer similar levels of control while also providing object-oriented concepts not present in the original design.