Note: some of the information on this page is a little dated; I haven't yet had time to fix it up. The important new information is that the ISO standard is now official.

From the horse's mouth ...

An Official WG13 home page now exists. This has the latest and "most official" information about Modula-2 standards.

What is ISO Standard Modula-2?

This information was extracted (with permission) from the Modula-2 FAQ maintained by Rick Sutcliffe. A committee of ISO JTC1/SC22/WG13 with delegates from several countries has met since 1987 to work on a standard description of Modula-2 and a set of standard library modules.

The international standard (IS 10514) has been voted on and will be official as soon as the comments have been attended to.

Where can I get the Modula-2 standard?

Format: Latex.

Who is the convenor of the standards group (WG13)?

A. Mark Woodman at m.woodman@open.ac.uk. NOTE: Mark Woodman has not been available for some time, and Kees Pronk c.pronk@twi.tudelft.nl has been appointed by SC22 as interim convenor of WG13.

Will I be able to read the standard?

The standard definition modules are at ftp://FTP.twu.ca/pub/modula2/ISOLibraries/ISODEFMods/ or ftp://ftp.mathematik.uni-ulm.de/pub/soft/modula/standard/libdefs/

The grammar can be found at http://www.twu.ca/faculty/fnas/math/rsbook/Appendices/Ap3.nisus.html. For classical Modula-2, see also COCO (section 4.9 of Rick's FAQ).

Differences between classical and ISO Modula-2: ISO Modula-2 has resolved most of the ambiguities in classical Modula-2. It adds the data type COMPLEX and LONGCOMPLEX, exceptions, module termination (FINALLY clause) and a complete standard I/O library. There are numerous minor differences and clarifications.

WG13 is working on two additional standards (separate from the main one) for (a) object oriented Modula-2 and (b) generic programming facilities. A ballot is at least several months away. Various versions of the latest generics proposal are stored in the directory ftp://FTP.twu.ca/pub/modula2/WG13/.