XDS Modula-2 and Oberon-2 Development System

What is XDS?

XDS is a professional Modula-2 and Oberon-2 programming system, which is available for most popular platforms. XDS provides a uniform cross-platform programming environment and allows to design and implement portable software.

Contents

1. Short description of XDS
2. Latest XDS Releases and Updates
3. Update History for Previous XDS Releases
4. Third Party Products for XDS

Short description of XDS

The XDS Modula-2 compiler implements the ISO Modula-2 language. In non-standard mode, the compiler also accepts Wirth's "Programming in Modula-2 (PIM)" syntax, e.g.: T(expr) instead of SYSTEM.CAST(T, expr).

The XDS Oberon-2 compiler complies to Wirth/Mössenböck's language report. In non-standard mode, the compiler also accepts the Oakwood extensions.

All XDS implementations share the same platform-independent front-end for both source languages, ensuring full source code compatibility. There are two different back-ends for XDS:

• XDS/NC: produces highly optimized 32-bit native code for Intel x86 and is available for Windows 2000/NT/98/95, OS/2 Warp, and Linux (elf).
• XDS/C: generates ANSI C source code and is available for Windows 2000/NT/98/95, OS/2 Warp, Linux, HP-9000/HP-UX, and SunSparc/Solaris.

The XDS library includes

• ISO Modula-2 module library
• PIM module library
• ANSI C library interface modules.
All library modules are accessible from XDS Modula-2 and Oberon-2 programs.

XDS/NC and XDS/C under Windows 2000/NT/98/95, and OS/2 Warp includes the operating system API (Win32/PM) interface modules and a state-of-the-art IDE.

XDS/NC under Windows 2000/NT/98/95, and OS/2 Warp also includes a linker, and a symbolic run-time debugger.

Latest XDS Releases

30-Apr-2002: XDS V2.50a

• XDS/NC native code (x86) for Windows 2000/NT/98/05 plus TSCP

24-Jan-2002: XDS release V2.50

• XDS/NC native code (x86) for Windows 2000/NT/98/05 plus TSCP
• XDS/NC native code (x86) for Linux (elf) plus TSCP
• XDS/C ANSI C-Translator for Windows 2000/NT/98/05 plus TSCP
• XDS/C ANSI C-Translator for Linux plus TSCP

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Update History for Previous XDS Releases

11-May-2000: XDS/NC native code (x86) release V2.45 for Windows 2000/NT/98/05

features:
• Support for SYSTEM.INT64 data type
• Faster memory manager
• Remote debugger

Latest XDS Updates

Customers with non-expired update service receive email notification with download instructions, each time an new update is available.

Update_1

03-Jun-2000: An update was released for XDS/NC V2.45 under Win 2000/NT/98/95 and for the associated TSCP in 01-Jun-2000: Fixes stack detection overflow problem and other minor errors. Stack overflow is now an additional exception:

#RTS: unhandled exception #23: stack overflow

Clients with non-expired update service can now download this update, which must be installed on-top of the V2.45 installation.

XDS/NC under OS/2 displays run-time error SYS3171 in case of a stack overflow in any program. In XDS-C, the underlying C run-time library is responsible for handling stack overflows.

Implementation restriction: Stack overflow detection is only implemented for the main process. For coroutines, this would have a considerable impact on performance, especially with multithreading, which is supported by XDS.

Other XDS implementations: XDS/C for Windows, OS/2, Linux, Sparc, HP relies on the underlying [3rd party] C library for stack checks. XDS/NC for Linux run-time library is compiled via XDS-C and supplied in C source form in order to make it work on all versions of Linux. So it also relies on the underlying [3rd party] C library for stack checks.

Update_2

16-Mar-2001: Update_2 consists of a new version of xc.exe (the xds compiler) for

XDS/NC v2.45 under Windows (together with its TSCP version of xc.exe)

Update_2 fixes an error in the codegenerator related to 8 and 16 bit signed type, i.e. Oberon-2's SHORTINT/INTEGER, when used used as FOR-loop control variable. (This fix of the FOR-loop not only concerns the Oberon-2 language mode; it also effects Modula-2's SYSTEM.INT8/16.)

Update_3

20-Oct-2001: Update_3 consists of a new version of xc.exe (the xds compiler) for

XDS/NC v2.45 under Windows (together with its TSCP version of xc.exe)

Code generator error in arithmetic expressions corrected; this error occured only rarely on particular structuring of formal procedure parameters.

Third Party Products for XDS

16-May-2000: New third party product offering: Integration of XDS/NC under WNT with MS Developer Studio (VC++ 6.0) takes full advantage of VC's grand luxe Windows debugger.