Baby Modula-3 is a

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by Function application, applying and Function composition (computer science), composing Function (computer science), functions. It is a declarat ...

sublanguage A sublanguage is a subset of a language. Sublanguages occur in natural language, computer programming language, and relational databases. In natural language In informatics, natural language processing, and machine translation, a sublanguage is ...

Modula-3 Modula-3 is a programming language conceived as a successor to an upgraded version of Modula-2 known as Modula-2+. It has been influential in research circles (influencing the designs of languages such as Java, C#, Python and Nim), but it ha ...

(safe subset)

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

based on ideals invented by

Martín Abadi Martín Abadi (born 1963) is an Argentine computer scientist, working at Google . He earned his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in computer science from Stanford University in 1987 as a student of Zohar Manna. He is well known for his work on comput ...

. It is an

object-oriented programming Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impl ...

language for studying

programming language design Programming languages are typically created by designing a form of representation of a computer program, and writing an implementation for the developed concept, usually an interpreter or compiler. Interpreters are designed to read programs, usu ...

; one part of it is implicitly prototype-oriented, and the other is explicitly statically typed designed for studying

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

type theory In mathematics and theoretical computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system. Type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a foundation of ...

. It has been checked as a

formal language In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "alphabet". The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbols that concatenate into strings (also c ...

metaprogramming Metaprogramming is a computer programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyse, or transform other programs, and even modi ...

systems. It comes from the ''Scandinavian School'' of object-oriented languages. Abadi tried to give an example of pure object-oriented language which would allow studying the

formal semantics Formal semantics may refer to: * Formal semantics (natural language), the empirical study of meaning in natural language using formal models * Formal semantics or semantics of logic, the mathematical study of the interpretations of formal language ...

of objects. "Baby Modula-3 is defined with a structured

operational semantics Operational semantics is a category of formal programming language semantics in which certain desired properties of a program, such as correctness, safety or security, are verified by constructing proofs from logical statements about its exec ...

and with a set of static type rules. A

denotational semantics In computer science, denotational semantics (initially known as mathematical semantics or Scott–Strachey semantics) is an approach of formalizing the meanings of programming languages by constructing mathematical objects (called ''denotations'' ...

guarantees the soundness of this definition."Baby Modula-3 and a theory of objects
Martin Abadi.

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

(DEC)

Systems Research Center The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California. DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Computer ...

(SRC) Research Report 95 (February 1993) This object model has been shown to have well definiteness decidability (a mechanical proof of it isn't known). Abadi worked at

(DEC)

(SRC) in

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. As DEC was bought by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

and then Compaq was bought by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

(HP), the SRC-report 95 was made available to the public by HP.

Influences

Luca Cardelli Luca Andrea Cardelli is an Italian computer scientist who is a research professor at the University of Oxford, UK. Cardelli is well known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. Among other contributions, in programming lang ...

and Martín Abadi wrote the book ''A Theory of Objects'' in 1996, laying out formal calculi for the semantics of object-oriented programming languages. Baby Modula-3 influenced this work according to Cardelli, and guided a calculus of the type of

self In philosophy, the self is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes. The first-person perspective distinguishes selfhood from personal identity. Whereas "identity" is (literally) same ...

in ''Types for object and the type of 'self. It has opened the way for work on Modula-3 formal semantic checking systems, for object-oriented

type system In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a ''type'' (for example, integer, floating point, string) to every '' term'' (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usu ...

programming languages that have been used to model the formal semantics of languages such as

Ada Ada may refer to: Arts and entertainment * '' Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle'', a novel by Vladimir Nabokov Film and television * Ada, a character in 1991 movie '' Armour of God II: Operation Condor'' * '' Ada... A Way of Life'', a 2008 Bollywo ...

and C.

References

Academic programming languages Modula programming language family Prototype-based programming languages Programming language design {{Prog-lang-stub