From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2003-07-18T00:28:36+09:00
Subject: Re: What's the point?

Michael Campbell wrote:
> I can only remember ever seeing this in Pascal (not that I have a wide language experience base).

Modula 2 had a feature called modules, which you could define within other modules and so on. The language design did not implicitly stop you doing this and being true to the design in a zen like maschocistic kind of way Wirth let the language out of the 
door with this 'feature'. No one ever found a real use for it and compiler writers hated it.

One of Modula 3s strong points was that you couldn't nest modules. But the ruling was arbitary.

Matz seems to be going with Wirth on this one rather than impose an arbitary constraint. Like the fact that you can actually type in x++ and --x without a special 'lint' rule to catch them (they just dont behave as expected, part of the problem C types 
have with it).