UCSD PASCAL (P-system) P-code

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Wed Nov 29 15:55:23 2000

> I have a bunch of books, discs, etc for the Apple II, and I "may" still
> have UCSD Pascal on some 8" Terak floppies. Pascal was the language of
> choice for Mac work for a number of years, then C and C+ etc. kind of
> dropped on everybody. Messy at first as all the header files were setup as
> calls to Pascal programs in the early Mac software developer stuff. IIRC
it
> was AlSoft that had a program/patch etc. that allowed MIDI support on a
Mac
> that was all in Pascal. I talked my wife into reworking the headers for
use
> with C programs, and sent it back to AlSoft and they used it, but I never
> heard anything back from them about it. Really POed me at the time.

I was told, but have never confirmed, that Apple had the source to
UCSD Pascal, and that Larry Teslar used it as the basis for Clascal,
the Pascal-variant (no pun intended) compiler used for Lisa and initial
Mac cross-development. Then they hired Niklaus Wirth to go from Clascal
to Object Pascal.

I still think Object Pascal is the *best* implementation of Pascal
ever... the linker could determine what methods could be statically
bound, keeping them fast, and leaving the rest dynamically bound for
polymorphism. Unlike Borland's Pascal(s) [this may have changed by
the time of Delphi), you could pass procedures and functions as
arguments to procedures and functions.

-dq
Received on Wed Nov 29 2000 - 15:55:23 GMT