Tom Verhoeff wrote:
Adriaan van Os wrote:
Frank Heckenbach wrote:
I might be a little confused about the Pascal compilers by Apple and/or for Mac, since I've never used one of them myself.
Yes, it is confusing, so I have listed the Pascal compilers for Macintosh that I know of:
I miss the UCSD Pascal system that ran (very well) on the Apple ][. I believe it was based on Wirth's p-system, producing p-code. It had a text-based UI with menus. A typical prompt looked like
Program-name: C(ommand1, C(ommand2, ...:
Because almost all the system software was written in UCSD Pascal as well, the language had been extended with numerous facilities for writing efficient system software. Many of these Pascal extensions have survived in one form or another.
We had a large group here in the Netherlands that did wonderful things with this system on homemade Apple ][ clones. These had been extended with 1 MB RAM disks (lightning fast). There were no hard disks at that time; only the slow 5.25" floppies for your OS, tools, and program and data files. I still have such a machine in my attic, but I have not tried to boot it in a very long time.
IMO Ken Bowles and crew tried to do too much at the Pcode level, and failed miserably at the file system. The files could only be created with pre-known size, and could not adapt to the disk system. The Pcode was sensitive to the byte sex of the machine, instead of being hidden by the interpreter, and thus was no longer machine independant. They also slapped their own copyright on what was basically the P4 compiler.
However the really fatal flaw was when they sold the system (to Softech, IIRC) and pulled the licenses. The result was that development stopped, at least in my case, since I would no longer have any rights to the result without litigation.
It was a considerable achievement anyhow. I have a box full of 8 inch disks somewhere with the original system for the 8080. They originated the concept of units. Unlike Turbo Pascal, USCD Pascal was pretty well standards compliant, with many extensions. In its day the editor was a joy to use. This dates back to the mid to late '70s.
BTW, this was a system that did NOT represent NIL as 0.