[supergarfield]

> The lack of .h files alone is a huge grievance for me

That's an interesting point... Besides C and its derivatives, and OCaml, do other languages have separate definition files? It seems like newer languages, even statically typed, normally don't.

I suspect the reason is that you have to duplicate all definitions, which seems like rote work. It also feels less necessary with IDE tooling: IDEs I know have a view for all definitions in a file.

[mumblemumble]

They don't, but, at least in object-oriented languages, much of overall experience is easy enough to replicate with formal interfaces and coding standards.

[KingOfCoders]

I thought the nice thing about Modula-2 was that you could browse through interface files to understand some code and then go into implementations.

[mumblemumble]

It's true, but there are so many ways to skin that cat. Smalltalk, for example, gives an even more fluid way to browse at a high level and then drill in, and it doesn't (necessarily) have source code files in the first place.