• Compilers/Translators
• Libraries/Sources
• Q&D Tools
• Papers/Documents
• Bash Scripts for Vim
• Miscellaneous Files

[ top ] Compilers / Translators

I removed the then outdated binary packages of GNU Modula-2 built in the Cygwin environment as I more and more moved away from Windows operating systems. I just want to point out here that it was a nice environment using Modula-2 with Vim and the Linux/GNU toolchain that I would use again if I’d have to use Windows again. Hints for people using Windows not familiar with the Linux/Unix world: Emacs and VIM are available in the Cygwin package directory; both editors come with Modula-2 syntax highlighting. Have a look at these programs. These are complete IDEs with great capabilities! You may also be interested in a generic makefile for GNU Modula-2 written by Duke Normandin. It was posted to the GNU Modula-2 mailing list by the author. Martin Kalbfuss wrote a M4 macro to detect GM2 as part of his project Schwarzer Kaffee. The file may be helpful for people using the GNU Build System with GM2.

FST 4.0 Modula-2 compiler with Mide3de2 v1.1: Installer-package for Windows bundling two freeware products. The file is about 1.5MB and offers html-docs and an uninstall-option. Also included are several libraries including an object oriented package similar to the Turbo C++ library and the alternative library for the compiler by Pat Terry. Note: Some users of Windows 2000 and Vista have reported problems, the package is not compatible with Windows 7/8 and will not be updated to be usable with these operating systems. Please note that most Modula-2 compilers from the DOS days can easily be used inside programs emulating their original environment. Try DOSBox for a start.

Gardens Point Modula-2 for DOS (gpm-pc): The Gardens Point Modula-2 compiler is a licensed commercial product. You are welcome to use it and distribute free copies of the software for trial or educational use. It must not be resold or distributed for sale with other programs which are for sale. "This software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." More and up to date information (February 2025) is available.

A kind visitor of these pages sent me a historically interesting package containing a DOS compiler called DCP Modula-2 (v2.0) from Eastern Germany dating from late fall 1989 (East Germany had just collapsed then) which seems to be a modified version of the M2MPC compiler from ETH / Modula Corp but appears to generate native code rather than M-Code (like the ETH compilers). The compiler can be run under emulator software such as DOSBox and compiles most of the PIM Modula-2 examples from the Coronado Tutorial.

m2tom3 is a Modula-2 to Modula-3 translator under GPL developed at the university of Aachen in Germany. It might be useful for people migrating their sources to Modula-3. The developers claim the translator produces readable and usable output. I now offer the package from this site as the various download links keep changing or even disappearing. You need a Modula-3 compiler to build the translator. There seem to be some minor problems but there are hints to get you going.

M2Latex is a package to help you in translating and pretty printing Modula-2 sources to LaTex. I hope we can make a version for Linux available as the program was developed for SunOS4 and does not compile on Linux boxes at the moment (Any C-people out there willing to help?).

A kind visitor of comp.lang.modula2 recently (2015) made available an interesting archive. "In 1985/1986, BYTE Magazine ran a series of articles by Jonathan Amsterdam on VM2, a virtual machine written in Modula-2, and then a compiler for this machine." Read more here.

[ top ] Libraries / Sources

hfilter.zip [8KB]: A high pass filter implemented in Gardens Point Modula-2 by Julian Miglio.

mouse.zip [3KB]: A simple mouse-library for Gardens Point Modula-2 written by Julian Miglio. Basic functions with self-explaining names are available: Show_Mouse, Hide_Mouse and Get_Mouse. Also comes with a test-program.

Christian Maurer’s "Murus" (short for "Modular Universe") was and is an impressive and well documented tree of Modula-2 sources under GPL. Dr. Maurer developed the package using the Mocka Modula-2 compiler and described his project as follows: "Murus is a collection of reusable software components, constructed during the last twentyfive years within the academic context of teaching algorithms and data structures, software engineering and project management, nonsequential programming and mathematics at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Freie Universität Berlin." Dr. Maurer moved on from Modula-2 to the Go language to develop Murus so I offer a version of Murus from the Modula-2-days here. The sources are documented in german language. Gunter Mueller recently (2017) made available a directory on GitHub containing Murus and the special compiler needed to build Murus.

M2LIB [1.4MB] is a huge Modula-2 library for Atari-compilers. It uses a preprocessor so it can be used with most Modula-2 compilers available for the Atari-platform. There are packages for providing POSIX-functions, an ISO-Modula-2 library and much more. This was written by Holger Kleinschmidt who kindly contributed the package. Just in case you are curious: this replaces the package M2POSX14 as this is what evolved from M2POSX.

olsen.tar.gz [1.5MB]: Olsen & Associates Portable Modula-2 Library. Description from README: "The library’s foremost feature is its portability. Applications which use the library should be portable (usually w/o modification) and the library definition and current implementation should easily port to other systems. The library was originally centered around I/O, but has been expanded to include those facilities which we found were required for Modula-2 application programming in general." I have to add: portability in this case means portability between the Sun Modula-2 compiler and the Logitech compiler for DOS systems. The Olsen library was going to be the library for the original Gnu Modula-2 compiler, which was being developed at University of Buffalo but sadly never released.

M2AFX contains an applications framework for Windows programming: The software implements a number of classes that encapsulate the weirdness of the Windows C API and attempts to present it in a cleaner way to the Modula-2 programmer. But "this software will only work on the TopSpeed Modula-2 compiler version 3.00 and later" as it uses the object-oriented extensions of TopSpeed Modula-2. This is how Mr. Stein describes the development of the package today: "M2AFX was implemented by me around 1992, while I was a student at the University of Oslo. My motivation was the book Windows++ by Paul DiLascia, in combination with my strong preference at the time for Modula-2 over C. At that time, developing for Windows meant programming in C, but I set out (in rather youthful spirit) to use Modula-2, more precisely JPI Modula-2, which offered object-oriented extensions. The polymorphism introduced by the JPI extensions allowed me to implement Modula-2 versions of the ideas describes by Paul DiLascia in his book. Please consider this a contribution to the historical archives. I do not take responsibility for any use of this code. In the spirit of Paul DiLascia (1959-2008): If this code works, it was written by Stein Jørgen Ryan inspired by Paul DiLascia. If not, I do not know who wrote it."

MBURG is "a bottom up tree rewriter in the general style of IBURG. It has a somewhat different implementation, and produces its output in standard Modula2." You will need a working Gardens Point Modula-2 compiler to use the package. "This program and its documentation are both copyright (c) 1995 Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. The program may be freely distributed in source or compiled form, provided this copyright notice remains intact in the sources. Original program, June 1995, John Gough." An introduction to MBURG is also available.

TopSpeed Extended Libraries [0.5MB]: This is a package written by Marco van de Voort. XtdLib (eXTenDed LIBraries) are libraries for TopSpeed 3.1x. Description by Marco van de Voort: "The original highlights were a pulldown system on top of module window, and a helpfile system." Not only interesting for owners of TopSpeed Modula-2.

XModula: "This is a set of files that will allow you to use the X-Windows (version 11, revision 6, also known as X11R6) library calls directly with the Modula-2 programming language. It includes the full Modula-2 foreign definition modules for the most important headers of X-Windows: Xlib.h, X.h, Xutil.h and keysyms.h". These files are quite old but still interesting.

MultiGraph library: A graphics library for TopSpeed or StonyBrook Modula-2 by Alex Iakovlev and Dimon Maslov. The readme says this library was offered as shareware. I do not know if this license still applies or if the authors can still be found. Here are the available versions: Graph Library for Stony Brook Modula-2 Ver 2.2, Graph Library for Stony Brook Modula-2 2.2 and TopSpeed Modula-2 1.17, 3.10, Graph Library for TopSpeed Modula-2 Ver 1.17 and Graph Library for TopSpeed Modula-2 Ver 3.10.

The following archives contain miscellaneous sources for FST and TopSpeed Modula-2 (All of the material was published years ago with the magazine "CHIP - Spezial Modula-2"). Misc. sources (1) [100KB]: miscellaneous sources, including how to program a simple editor. Misc. sources (2) [050KB]: miscellaneous sources. Misc. sources (3) [080KB]: miscellaneous sources, including searching- and sorting-routines.

There once was a group in Usenet... It was called net.sources. Some files are available from there which I put up here to just keep them available: MakeMake is a program written by Steve Tynor (modified by Gregory Elder and Bob Dukelow) to create makefiles for Modula-2 programs. The archive contains a port of MakeMake to work in the Logitech Modula-2/86 environment. There also are the remains of OSSI, a standard system interface for Modula-2 programs. More information on OSSI is available from the local Q&A area. The archive provided here contains only the definition modules of the OSSI optional part.

[ top ] Q&D Tools

Q&D Tools. An impressive package containing various (lots of) useful utilities for the DOS-commandline which are usable under different Microsoft Windows operating systems. A lot of the programs and utilities were rewritten using the XDS compiler to generate native Microsoft Windows programs. These binaries are available in a separate package. Some but not all sources (Topspeed Modula-2, PowerBasic, Visual Basic) are available. The package is freeware, copyrights by Philippe Guiochon. Please read the enclosed license for details. Some programs that are part of the package are distributed as part of Ultimate Boot CD.

[ top ] Documents

For printing and adapting the document for your needs I provide a PDF (Portable Document Format) as well as an ODT (Open Document Format) version of the freely available Coronado Enterprises Modula-2 tutorial. The examples are also available to have everything available from here. Keep in mind there is another version of the tutorial available at modula2.org which is adapted to newer compilers such as ADW and XDS Modula-2. Find more information in the tutorials and papers section.

FST-debug.zip [2KB]: This document by Julian Miglio describes howto debug programs compiled with FST Modula-2 using the Turbo Debugger made by Borland. An example is contained in the archive. MODULA-2 – A Language For The 80’s [8KB]: This is an old paper giving a short overview of Modula-2. I think the text is still usable for beginners and Pascal-programmers. HTML documentation for FST Modula-2 [46KB]: Makes life easier, especially for beginners using Fitted Soft Modula-2. Simply converted to HTML, it’s the original doc by Roger Carvalho. Modula-2 to Oberon [12KB]: This file is a tech report from ETH Zurich written by Nicklaus Wirth. It can be freely distributed as long as it isn’t modified in any way and notice is included stating that it isn’t to be modified. Some interesting facts about Modula-2 (what is not so good about it etc.). Structure of Modula-2 programs [41KB]: description and introduction to Modula-2 on 50 pages of text in rtf-format. Found it somewhere on the net. I didn’t modify it, should I be violating anyones copyright, email me and I’ll remove it. Gardens Point Modula-2 Library Reference: Useful when getting used to the libraries of the compiler. I created this a long time ago, maybe it is still useful for someone (This documentation is for the Linux-version but I think it’s quite "portable"). M2F Modula-2 Library Reference: Similar to the package above this can be useful to people new to the compiler.

Information on ISO Modula-2 is rare. That’s why I offer 3 articles that are also available via FTP. The articles give a little background information on ISO Modula-2 and help to understand the differences between PIM and ISO. I also converted the original documents to pdf - the result doesn’t look that good in Acrobat Reader but if you print the files the output looks good again (Seems to be a problem of Ghostscript which I used for the conversion). (1) [pdf] [ps] ISO/IEC 10514-1, the standard for Modula-2: Process Aspects (2) [pdf] [ps] ISO/IEC 10514-1, the standard for Modula-2: Changes, Clarifications and Additions (3) [pdf] [ps] Standardized Extensions to Modula-2

[ top ] Bash Scripts for Vim

The following are simple and short bash scripts which I used to save time when working with GNU Modula-2 and Vim (Debian and Cygwin). Most of the scripts just accept one parameter, that is a module name without file extension. The scripts have to be made executable and work in the current directory. nm (new module): provided with a module name it creates both a basic definition and implementation Modula-2 file in the current directory and opens both files in Vim using the split window feature of the editor. You can edit the file to have vertical or horizontal splitting. om (open module): is a script used to open both parts (definition and implementation) of an existing module in Vim side by side. Just call it with the modules name. ml (module and library): a script to open the given module in the left window of the split Vim screen and the file explorer with the wanted library in the right window. Depending on your installation you may have to apply the correct path to the gm2 libraries you wish to browse. op (open project): this script doesn’t need any command line option. After entering a projects directory you can use it to open the Makefile and a file explorer of the current directory.

[ top ] Miscellaneous Files

SynEdit 2.4 is an editor written by Matthew Inman. The program has nothing to do with the "multi-line edit control for Borland Delphi and C++Builder" wich you can find at SourceForge.net (wich is common for SynEdit now). It is a complete and free editor with lots of functions wich is no longer developed. It’s got problems (really slow) with really big files (0.5MB+), but it’s usable for good modularized projects. The original website mkidesign.com is no longer available and it gets harder and harder to find a copy of the program - so here it is.

GPM Total: A nice IDE for the DOS-version of Gardens Point Modula-2. The package disappeared from the net so I offer it here. This is a classic Borland Turbo Vision application coming with a simple installation program.

Yuri sent a package of files to make Notepad++ (a free editor based on Scintilla) aware of Modula-2: "This archive contains a set of Modula-2 additions for Notepad++ v.7.9.1+". His work replaces the files for Notepad++ which do no longer work with the latest versions of Notepad++. Please note: Notepad++ uses Scintilla as its basic editing component as do CodeLite and Code::Blocks (both are "full featured" IDEs). You may want to try the files provided here with these Integrated Development Environments. May/should work? Please report back -

ISO Modula-2 syntax-highlighting for Vim (tested v6.2). Language: 10514-1: 1996, Modula-2, Base Language.

ISO Modula-2 syntax-highlighting file for the ConText editor. Just copy the file to subdirectory ‘highlighters’ of your ConText installation. Language: 10514-1: 1996, Modula-2, Base Language.

ISO Modula-2 syntax highlighting for U. Meybohms editor Proton. Howto use the file: (1) Copy the downloaded file to subdirectory ‘syntaxschemes’ of your Proton-installation, (2) edit the file ‘extensions.ini’ in the same directory. The necessary change may vary depending on the compiler in use! Be careful to avoid double-binding a file-extension. Language: 10514-1: 1996, ISO Modula-2, Base Language.

The growing list of editors providing Modula-2 syntax highlighting can be found here.

Here’s a spinning Modula-2 logo I created for an older pagelayout. Feel free to use it for your own page. It’s background is transparent, but it looks better on dark colors...

One more: An animated button for your homepage featuring Dexter from Dexter’s Lab. To be used if Modula-2 did something for your page (for example the CGI-programs are written in Modula-2 or a Modula-2 program does automatic HTML-creation for you and so on).