Niklaus Wirth RIP, 15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024

[EdS]

Reported today that Niklaus Wirth has died. I thought it might be nice to share any related links, videos, or threads found here (or elsewhere.)

(From video Niklaus Wirth, 1984 ACM Turing Award Recipient)

The School of Wirth is a minisite by @HansOtten on Wirth’s languages and legacy (mentioned here)

Of course we have many previous threads mentioning Wirth, or Pascal, Oberon or the Lilith machine. Here are a few picks

"Pascal and its Successors" - Niklaus Wirth

Finding this long essay (presently down, see archive here) a good read. Here’s an extended excerpt: Today, it is hard to imagine the circumstances prevailing in the 1960s. We must recall that the computing community was strictly split into two professional camps. The scientists and engineers used Fortran for their programming large-scale, word-oriented, binary computers, wheres the business community used Cobol for their smaller, character-oriented, decimal machines. System programmers were la…

Here Wirth demonstrates Oberon and the Ceres machine (via)

Ceres PC and Oberon demonstration by Niklaus Wirth at ETH, 2011

From The History of Apple’s Pascal “Syntax” Poster, 1979-80

@Paul_Kimpel

The origin of the Pascal syntax diagram is, of course, the set of diagrams in Appendix D of the Pascal User Manual and Report, Kathleen Jensen and Niklaus Wirth

Also see

The strange story of opcode "36" (Pascal S, CDC6600)

Pascal S is a weak subset of Pascal, good for learning how to write a compiler. The first implementation, by Wirth, was for the CDC6600 (it has since been ported) and includes the compiler and the bytecode interpreter. But it turns out that the implementation of one of the opcodes is simply broken on other architectures - it turns out there’s an assumption about the now-rather-unusual number formats of the CDC6600. Here’s the full story, from Scott Moore: http://www.standardpascaline.org/pasca…

[jhi]

ElReg had a decent obit: RIP: Software design pioneer Niklaus Wirth • The Register

[jdreesen]

Never met him personally, although he lived close by.
I still need to repair my Lilith, might even reconstruct one using spare parts I have.
Meanwhile anyone wanting to try Modula on the Lilith can download my Lilith Emulator “Emulith”

[oldben]

What is the difference between Modula and Modula 2?
Can you run Modula 2.

[jhi]

According to Wikipedia, Modula-2 added:

• modules
• coroutines
• access to machine-specific data

Looking at “Programming in Modula-2” it looks like the last item means e.g. more direct access to memory and pointers.

Note that Modula-3 was not by Wirth, though, I clarified this in the Wikipedia page now (we’ll see whether it survives the Wikistapo.)

Modula-2

[EdS]

@jhi

a decent obit: RIP: Software design pioneer Niklaus Wirth • The Register

Thanks - some nice links in there too! Particularly it reminds me of Oberon, which (AIUI) goes all the way from CPU design, through OS, to windowing system, all in a very clear way.

In his work, the languages and tools he created, in his eloquent plea for smaller, more efficient software – even in the projects from which he quit – his influence on the computer industry has been almost beyond measure.

[elb]

ETH Zurich, where Dr. Wirth was on the faculty for over 30 years, has put out an obituary:

Computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth has died

[dt1802]

I remember reading the code for his PL/0 compiler one day, and marveling at its simplicity. Oberon (and its FPGA computer) are on my “round tuit” list, which alas is excessively large.

[oldben]

Mine is lost in cardboard box some where, in the JUNK closet. Compiling code is easy,
but most books just gloss over the important code generation section. Wirth was a bit better.
Untill I get my hardware working, software is minor issue, and I will look at Oberon again
or some other language.