Cluster (programming language)

Cluster is a programming language that was developed in the early 1990s by Thomas Pfrengle and Ulrich Sigmund ( StoneWare ) for the Amiga graphic card system EGS . It is a dialect of the Modula-2 programming language with borrowings from Oberon ( object-oriented elements ) and Ada (exception handling).

properties

• strict and static types
  • Ordinal types : integers , lists , characters , truth values
  • Subranges of ordinal types
  • Sets over ordinal types
  • Ordinal type fields for indexes
  • Floating point numbers
  • Texts
  • Tags, a specialty of the Amiga operating system : pairs of a property and a parameter
  • Data networks and objects
  • Subroutines and functions
• Modules
• Generic modules without machine code duplication
• Object orientation (multiple inheritance in approaches)
• automatic release of resources such as memory, windows, file access, etc .; however, it can easily happen that resources are released too early
• Exception handling (exceptions)
• concurrent programming in approaches ( threads )
• Support for calls to AmigaOS function libraries
• machine-level programming elements (query of processor flags, embedded assembler programs)

Projects

Probably the best known projects realized with the cluster are

• the object-oriented graphical user interface from EGS,
• the cluster development environment and
• a sound processing program called Assampler .