Re:Lilith and Modula-2
by junto on Sunday May 04, 2025 @01:04PM
(#43887905)
After self teaching myself BASIC and Pascal as a kid, Modula-2 was the language we first learnt at university in order to teach us programming fundamentals. It was a nice move from Pascal for me but I preferred Delphi.
Although the keywords in Modula-2 weren’t case sensitive and weren’t required to be in upper case, it was preferred (guidance from Niklaus Wirth) and that was just annoying.
Re:Lilith and Modula-2
by emme on Sunday May 04, 2025 @02:08PM
(#43888323)
I started programming with Modula-2 and I really believe it was case sensitive. In fact I remember the book I used to learn it (Ogilvie) mentioning the case sensitiveness as a peculiarity of the language: "if case matters in natural languages, why programming languages should ignore it"
Re:Lilith and Modula-2
by glonq on Monday May 05, 2025 @03:15PM
(#43898430)
I took a similar path -- BASIC at home, Turbo Pascal in highschool, Modula-2 in college. Our prof had learned under Wirth and wanted us to use Modula-2 a lot more than we wanted to.
Although the keywords in Modula-2 weren’t case sensitive and weren’t required to be in upper case, it was preferred (guidance from Niklaus Wirth) and that was just annoying.
Was this the case or something else?
Always looking to improve my knowledge on Wirthian languages.
Next on the list at university was C++, so more than likely my brain is deliberately blocking out that language. :-)
After Pascal, all languages that Niklaus Wirth created were case sensitive.
Uppercase keywords are debatable as a style, however with good IDE tooling hardly an issue.
Similarly to BASIC and SQL, or spaces in ML languages and Python, don't use Notepad like editors for them, use something with autoformatter.
Pity that in Modula-2 case those products are long gone, and I doubt many would bother with a VSCode extension or something.
[1] http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/lilith/emulith/ [2] http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/lilith/docu/Lilith_hardw... (pdf; 20 MB) [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43885478