 At ETH Zürich, Niklaus Wirth and his colleagues had also been investigating such topics as data abstraction and modular programming (although this had been in common use in the 1960s or earlier).Modula-2 (1978) included both, and their succeeding design, Oberon, included a distinctive approach to object orientation, classes, and such.Object-oriented features have been added to many previously existing languages, including Ada, BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, and COBOL.