TopSpeed Modula-2

Description

A fast Modula 2 development system for 16 bit OS/2 and DOS code, can be run natively or by cross compiling from DOS. System now owned by Clarion who use it as a utility development system. Developed by Niels Jensen of Jensen & Partners, who was one of the people behind Turbo Pascal.

One unusual aspect of the TopSpeed system was that you could buy variants of the development system for C, C++ and Pascal in addition to the Modula 2 compiler and they shared a back end. Not only could you call C, C++ or Pascal code from the Modula compiler ( and vise versa) but you could mix and match the languages in one source file without resorting to any containers. An unique feature in its time and only one or two other development systems have offered similar features since.

While there never was a 32bit version of the TopSpeed package for OS/2, the compiler is still used for development of command line interface programs for eCS. This is due to both the quality of the compiler output in particular and in general the quality of the supplied tools but also since the OS/2 CLI is still only 16 bit so for smaller command line programs the advantages of 32 bit tools are limited.

Please note that the last version shipped still had a couple of bugs in the thread library, so care needs to be taken when developing multi-threaded programs.

Version

• 3.10

Links

• http://www.excelsior-usa.com/doc/xds/xc22.html
• http://www.nezumi.demon.co.uk/modula/jpi/jpi_m2.htm

License

• Commercial

Author

• Niels Jensen

Related Articles

• Modula-2 Legacy Code: Problems and Solutions by Dmitry Leskov. Discusses porting of older Topspeed M2 code to more modern systems
• http://www.pmoylan.org/pages/os2/os2m2.html#ts Peter Moylan's assessment of TopSpeed Modula 2

Links

• http://www.drdobbs.com/whats-new-with-modula-2/184408565 Announcement of TopSpeed Modula 2 v3 at Dr. Dobbs Site