[M3devel] Modula-3 questions

[Mika Nystrom]

penn43 at gmx.com writes:
...
>
>BTW How many Modula-3 users are there? This info can serve as a "reality check
>", to establish whether the language is dying or not.
>Also, are there newcomers to the language? Or the only programmers who use it 
>are those who need to maintain legacy code? Most crucially, are any NEW progra
>ms written in the language?
>These are crucial questions to assess the situation in a more objective way. W
>hat are your views on these points?
>
>To start with, could you hint to what kind of projects (new/legacy code) you u
>se Modula-3 for? Would you use Modula-3 if you had to start writing the same p
>rograms from scratch?
>
>Thanks
>
>
>Marresh
>

Whenever I have the choice I write new code in Modula-3 or some system
built on top of it.  The main projects I've done recently have been
a Verilog test bench generator written in Scheme (run on top of M3);
an analysis program for financial forecasting (using some "serious"
matrix math, e.g., Singular Value Decomposition); a circuit timing
verifier written in a combination of Modula-3 and Scheme, incorporating
everything from efficient parsers (in-place parsing using recursive
descent) to a simple calculus and interval arithmetic package (in Scheme);
a high-frequency stock trading program (data-to-order latencies around
50 microseconds).  Most of these projects would have been much more
laborious with any other tool I know of, or would have involved some
serious performance tradeoffs.

    Mika