A tribute to late Niklaus Wirth

Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, author of several computer languages (perhaps the most famous of them is Pascal) died on the first day of this year, on January the 1st 2024, a few weeks before his 90th birthday.

I recommend reading an excellent obituary at The Register - and let me mention three ways in which this distinguished scientist influenced the development of D2000.

Modula-2

When the Ipesoft D2000 real-time application server was designed in 1993, the first implementation was on the OS/2 platform using the Modula-2 language (it was a 16-bit compiler). This language was created in 1977 by none other than Niklaus Wirth.

Ada

In 1998, with the transition to the majority operating system Windows NT, there was a need to migrate Ipesoft D2000 to a 32-bit platform. The authors of D2000 decided to use the Ada language, since its new standard adopted in 1995 already supported working with objects. How does this fact relate to Mr. Wirth? It is possible to read on Wikipedia that he was also involved in the design of the Ada language - specifically as a member of the High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG), which was an international working group created by the US Department of Defense with the aim of creating a new programming language suitable for the development of military real-time embedded computer systems.

Niklaus Wirth was one of the academics who were paid members of this group. Another, for example, was the well-known Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra. The result of their work was the iterative formulation of requirements for this new language (from the Strawman document, through Woodenman, Tinman, to the final Ironman and Steelman). Based on these requirements, several companies then created language designs. The winning design created by the French team Cii Honeywell Bull was named Ada in honor of the first programmer Ada Lovelace. You can read more details in a separate blog.

Apparently, the participation of N.Wirth also contributed to the fact that the new language preserved the good functional features that Modula-2 already contained, so the migration to Ada was successful and since 1998, Ipesoft D2000 has been developed primarily in this language.

One more interesting thing: when migrating D2000 from the Modula-2 language, the developers also considered the Oberon language - which was also created by Niklaus Wirth.

Algorithms and Data Structures

The third but no less important influence of Mr. Wirth on the development of D2000 lies in the writing of the book Algorithms and Data Structures. Its Slovak translation titled Algoritmy a štruktúry údajov was for many years used as a standard university textbook at the University of Žilina, whose graduates make up the majority of D2000 developers. Therefore, many ideas from this book served as inspiration for the development of the D2000. An example (besides the design of data structures) is the implementation of the ESL (Event Script Language) compiler, which is used to create scripts for customizing event handling in D2000.

I remember that in 1993, as a high school student, I went to a bookstore with my friend, at that time an university student, and bought Mr. Wirth's book on his recommendation.

Mr. Wirth - thank you for everything you have contributed to the development of computer languages and programming. They probably don't need computers in heaven, but I hope that won't prevent you from having interesting theoretical discussions with other giants of computer science whom you will meet there. Requiescat in pace!