Elego Software Solutions would like to offer to coordinate the development of the CM3 5.1 sources, especially the core system, for the next time. We'll continue to produce releases and installation archives, integrate patches and extensions, provide installation and porting help, and would even offer some commercial support for those who want to make professional use of CM3. You should keep in mind that CM3 5.1 is a free code distribution without any warranties, and that the resources of help and support are not unlimited. If you have any questions about CM3, please mail to m3-support{at}elego.de. Please don't be disappointed if you don't get an immediate answer; we're just a small German company and cannot employ any full-time m3 support people (unless someone would be willing to pay for them, of course :-); but be assured that we will not ignore any reasonable questions and requests.
Currently all the sources are under CVS control at elego Software Solutions. We would like to setup public CVS and CVSup access to everything soon, but it may take a while until this can be realized. How things will develop will of course depend on the wishes and support of the M3 user community. For the time being, we would like to get patches in context diff or unified diff format from all those that want to participate.
Eventually it may be well to mix the existing PM3 and the CM3 Modula-3 distributions, but for elego this is no short time goal, as there are quite a lot of incompatibilities and changes that make this difficult, including the build system (quake), documentation (html/sgml tools), language semantics (esp. exceptions and pragmas), and interfaces (e.g. text/unicode). For the time being, the two distributions may coexist and mutually benefit from each other. I'm already very thankful for the up-to-date runtime support and Unix interfaces I borrowed from PM3 and integrated into the CM3 system.
It is unlikely that Modula-3 will ever become a widely used language, but we think it has the potential to be a readily available and very powerful tool for those who are able to choose the best suited tool for some purpose. With the extensions CM3 5.1 provides, many of the issues known to be wanting in Modula-3 have been addressed or will be easier addressable. We would like to keep CM3 alive as a small, quick to install and easy to use system.