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.file extension IC - Modula-3 M3CG intermediate language file
File extension IC description:
Modula-3 is a programming language conceived as a successor to an upgraded version of Modula-2. While it has been influential in research circles (influencing the designs of languages such as Java and C#), it has not been adopted widely in industry. It was designed by Luca Cardelli, Jim Donahue, Mick Jordan, Bill Kalsow and Greg Nelson at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Systems Research Center (SRC) and Olivetti in the late 1980s. Its design was heavily influenced by work on the Modula-2+ language in use at SRC at the time, which was the language in which the operating system for the DEC Firefly multiprocessor VAX workstation was written. As the revised Modula-3 Report states, the language was also influenced by other languages such as Mesa, Cedar, Object Pascal, Oberon and Euclid.
Modula-3's main features are simplicity and safety while preserving the power of a systems-programming language. Modula-3 aimed to continue the Pascal tradition of type safety, while introducing new constructs for practical real-world programming. In particular Modula-3 added support for generic programming (similar to templates), multithreading, exception handling, garbage collection, object-oriented programming, partial revelation and encapsulation of unsafe code. The design goal of Modula-3 was a language that implements the most important features of modern imperative languages in quite basic forms. Thus allegedly dangerous and complicating features like multiple inheritance and operator overloading were omitted.