Bad timing, basically. By the time Modula-2 appeared, Pascal was rather popular, and there were a lot of extensions to the official standard that mirrored the m

Bad timing, basically. By the time Modula-2 appeared, Pascal was rather popular, and there were a lot of extensions to the official standard that mirrored the main features of Modula-2. I think it was UCSD Pascal that introduced "Units", and that was quickly taken up by other popular compilers. Also, by that time OOP started to rear its seven heads, and Modula-2 didn't have an answer to that, whereas yet another Pascal extensions (e.g. by Apple or Borland) filled that role. ISO Pascal and late Turbo Pascal/Delphi are about as far apart as they're to Modula-2, but you still had the name and quite often transitioned by compiler release, not language standard. Modula-3 and Oberon answered the OOP call, but the former wasn't officially Wirthian and the latter probably too minimalist and non-industrial. Also, of course, the BCPL language family enjoyed a steady rise during that time, first C eating into the Pascal space and then C++ becoming the standard low-level OO language.