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From: clodius@hotspec.lanl.gov (William Clodius)
Subject: Re: spate of programming languages
Date: 1996/07/26
Message-ID: <g1vifafuzv.fsf@hotspec.lanl.gov>#1/1
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sender: clodius@hotspec.lanl.gov
references: <4tb9b6$9bl@hermes.acs.unt.edu>
to: mantri@ponder.csci.unt.edu (Ramesh S. Mantri)
followup-to: comp.lang.misc
organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.misc
Date: 1996-07-26T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Ramesh:

First you might try posting in comp.lang.modula3, or comp.lang.misc as
there is almost nothing in your post that is Ada specific.

Second, as to your specific questions:

The developers of Modula 3 cite many influences, among them Ada.

Modula-2 was developed by Nicklaus Wirth. I don't know if he has a
copyright on the name Modula (I suspect not because it is now an
international standard), but the Modula 3 FAQ states that the
developers had Wirth's blessing to develop Modula 3.

As to state of the art languages, although there are a large number of
recent languages, most popular languages have to have more than a few
years history behind them to become popular. Java seems to be the
exception that proves this rule.  This in turn implies that they are
typically not quite state of the art, but also means that they are
more robust, portable, and better supported than most proper state of
the art languages.

However, if you are truly interested in state of the art languages
then you could hardly do better than consult Mark Leone's main page

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mleone/web/language-research.html

and his language overviews page

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mleone/web/language/overviews.html

As to possible suggestions of languages to study, you seem to have a
good foundation in imperative object oriented languages.  I might
suggest examining a few other paradigms, e.g., logic (Mercury and
Goedel have good reputations), data flow (Sisal, J, NESL, Nial, or
perhaps F), high order functional, (Clean, Haskell, Objective Caml),
or high level language (Perl 5.0, Python, or Icon).

I am cross-posting this to comp.lang.misc, and limiting followups to
comp.lang.misc.
-- 

William B. Clodius		Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos National Laboratory	Email: wclodius@lanl.gov
Los Alamos, NM 87545