freebsd-ports/lang/modula-3/pkg-descr

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This is a port of Modula-3 release 3.5.3, from DEC Systems Research
Center. Modula-3 is a modern compiled programming language designed
for systems programming as well as large applications. Some notable
features include:
* A clean type system with good support for object-oriented
programming.
* A powerful module system.
* Lightweight threads, fully integrated into the language and all of
the libraries.
* Generics.
* Exceptions.
* Automatic storage management by a multithreaded, incremental,
generational garbage collector.
* Guaranteed type safety, plus the ability to confine unsafe code
behind safe interfaces.
* Elegance and simplicity, even compared with less powerful
languages such as C++ and Ada.
* Ease of integration with existing C libraries.
* A huge collection of runtime libraries, providing:
- Text manipulation.
- Generic containers (lists, sequences, tables, etc.).
- Atoms and symbolic expressions.
- An extensible stream I/O system.
- Persistent objects.
- Operating system interfaces.
- Networking.
- Very nice object-oriented graphics facilities, and some
convenient tools for building GUIs.
* A convenient browser.
A wealth of information about Modula-3 can be found at:
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/modula-3/html/home.html
This port includes patches for a number of bugs found since the
release of DEC SRC's version 3.5.3. To save space and time, only
the most commonly-used subset of the DEC distribution is built and
installed by this port. That includes the standard libraries and
the graphics packages, but not the (huge) separate projects such
as netobj, zeus, obliq, and visual obliq. You can change what is built
by doing "make configure" and then editing "work/m3/src/m3makefile".
NOTE: Despite appearances to the contrary, the shared library
version numbers are not related to the version number of the DEC
SRC release.
-- John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>