[cctalk] Re: "It's dead, Jim" Was: Re: Intel 3086

On Wed, 2026-06-17 at 10:03 -0500, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote: Modula-2 is a descendant of Pascal, actually developed by Wirth and his students. Then Wirth had second thoughts about separating definition and implementation, a cornerstone of Modula-2 and Ada, and developed Oberon. I had some correspondence with him about my proposal for a similar separation of definition and implementation in Fortran, now standardized as "submodules" — analogous to the Implementation Module in Modula-2 or the Package Body in Ada. He agreed that in large or complicated projects, it's important. It also allows commercial providers such as NAG to publish definitive machine-readable interfaces without publishing the source code for intellectual property or trade secrets.

Fortran is alive and well. The national and international committees are meeting in Coventry (and Zoom) this week to put the finishing touches on Fortran 2028.