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What benefits would you see Modula-3 offering over the numerous other languages available today?

There wasn't anything particularly special about it when I last used it in the 1990s. It wasn't a bad language, but there wasn't anything particularly compelling about it or its implementations, either. There was nothing that really made it more useful than C++, or even Delphi and Java.

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I can't add much over what wikipedia [0] says. One of the most attractive features for me was the rapid compilation times and the module system (they go hand in hand).

Modula-3 predated Java by about 10 years and I'd say the type system [1] still surpasses it. Modula-3 was nearly everything that Java ended up being, a safe performant systems language.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/courses/modules/papers/cardelli-e...

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