10 May
2024
10 May
'24
12:33 a.m.
On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 6:31 PM Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
HP chose Pascal as their system programming language when they came to
rewrite the HP 3000's MPE Operating System onto PA-RISC to produce
MPE/XL in the mid 80s. It had many extensions to solve the inherent
limitations of standard Pascal, like the ability to have formal
parameters which could receive actual values of any type, extensive
pointer support, well-defined variant records, etc., etc. It remained
the most popular language for writing low-level code inside HP and for
customers as well, even after C became available. C (including GCC
when we got POSIX support) was more commonly used to port open source
stuff to the machine.
We sold an early client-server retail POS system with a Classic MPE
3000 talking to HP-150 IIs over serial ports, which was written in
PASCAL/V on the 3000 and Microsoft Pascal on the HP-150s. Even this
earlier Pascal had sufficient extensions to get done what you needed
to do without issue.
On May 9,
2024, at 6:43 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
I've written code in Pascal, as well as Modula-2. Never liked
it--seemed to be a bit awkward for the low-level stuff that I was doing.
Not surprising, since that's not what it is all about. Both, like their predecessor
ALGOL-60 as well as successors like Ada, are strongly typed languages where doing unsafe
stuff is made very hard.