A Pragmatic Journey into C++ Modules

FORTRAN IV was my first language in 1968. I attended a one-day-a-week six-week seminar at the State University of New York/Buffalo to learn the language and program submission to the IBM 704. I soon became a full-time computer operator at the university, working on a CDC 6400 and finishing my degree there. During that period, I was exposed to multiple languages: Algol, SNOBOL, Lisp (a lot of silly insipid parenthesis), and Pascal. I saw copies of the original Pascal compiler code.

I next worked at the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics, where I trained and worked with Forth. Unfortunately, that position went away, and I moved to Houston. My positions there exposed me to assembly language, more Fortran and Forth, and PL/M and C for Intel embedded systems.

I started using C++ with the 1990 release of Turbo C++, switching to MSVC shortly after and until my retirement in 2006. With the demise of Windows XP, I switched to Linux using GCC and, more recently, Clang.

I've used C++ in robotics competitions for NASA and the National Institute of Science and Technology, winning some money but not the big prizes. They were great exercises.

In 2022, I snuck, by invitation, into the Toronto CppNorth convention for one evening. This sparked an interest in speaking, which I did at CppNorth and CppCon in '23 and again in Toronto in '24. This study of modules is proposed for this year's CppNorth conference.

I've also written for programming magazines in the '90s, Hackaday.com in the mid-2010s, and Medium.com for the last few years.