Re: [tlug] [CFP] Call for presenters - May 23 Technical Meeting

[Benjamin Kowarsch <trijezdci@example.com>]

Hi Alberto,

I have half a presentation ready for the Modula-2 revision project I have been working on.

I could finish that. It's not a big deal. Also I got a new notebook, so this time we won't have any technical issues.

I had outlined the Modula-2 project to you before I think, but for convenience, here once again in a nutshell:

Modula-2 is a type safe systems programming language of the Pascal family by Prof. Niklaus Wirth of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who designed it as a successor to Pascal in 1978. A friend of mine who is a professor for mathematics at a Vancouver university and I have spent the last five years revising and modernising it with the blessing of Prof. Wirth. We finished the design early this year and I started work on the bootstrap compiler since.

The author of the GNU Modula-2 front end for GCC is also working on supporting the new dialect in GCC.

The rationale is basically that we are not going to see any improvement in software safety until we completely get rid of C. All our software, including our operating systems, will have to be rewritten or else we will continue to doctor the symptoms instead of eradicating the root cause. And as long as the higher level languages are based on C in that they are implemented in C, their use does not ultimately solve the problem either. This is going to be a generational effort but it will have to be done. The languages that provide the safety are however structurally so far removed from C that a rewrite of existing software will require lots of redesign which makes the effort even more daunting. The best approach is to do this in a safe language that is structurally equivalent or at least very close to C so that most of the existing C code can easily be transcribed. Classic Modula-2 almost fit the bill and our revision filled in the missing pieces.

regards

benjamin

On 17 May 2015 at 22:23, A.Tomita <atomita@example.com> wrote:

On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 21:57:14 +0900
"A.Tomita" <atomita@example.com> wrote:

> our next Technical Meeting will be held on May 23 (Saturday), 13:00-16:30 at Gotanda Culture Center.
>
> if you are working on any personal or professional project, or just have anything interesting you'd like to present, please let us know!

and one of the presenters will not be able to make it.

even if you don't have a full presentation, please let us know
if you would like to deliver a lightning talk (anything between 10 to 30 min).