lisadraw - Why Pascal?

Chandra Bajpai wrote: Yes, actually. I think they had a Pascal compiler in the Apple II or III days even. There is nothing inherently wrong with Pascal as a language. Personally, I'd much rather type in { and } than begin and end everywhere, so perhaps the syntactic sugar of other languages was more appealing. The enforced typing and range checking can be a bit annoying, but they do keep your code clean and expose bugs early on - so they are helpful. I suppose you could think of them as training wheels, hence "teaching language." There is one thing that Pascal does better which is strings. Zero terminated strings are problematic in many ways. i.e. buffer overflows, strlen() and strcat have to read in the entire string, so are much slower. PStrings are a lot better, at least when you can choose the width of length integer. (For the original versions, a single byte is a bit limiting.) I think a lot of the issues people have with it was originally aimed at the P-Code versions which, of course was painfully slow. Also lot of the early compilers were poor at optimizing code, and this applies to most compilers as those were the early days. (There was no JIT back then.) I never actually used the Lisa's Pascal compiler to do anything useful, but the LisaWorkshop was not a GUI environment. It was a text based menu system where you invoked the editor (which was a GUI program), the compiler, and other tools separately through a set of text menus. If you were to compare it with, say, Borland's Turbo Pascal, which arrived much further on down the road, it was probably not as fast a compiler, and probably didn't produce code that was as fast. Now Lisa did have an OOP version of Pascal called Clascal. I'm not sure how much of the OS is written in straight Pascal and how much in Clascal, but they did manage to originally miss taking SmallTalk from Xerox. :-) You can find LisaWorkshop here: http://www.macmothership.com/lisacontent/app_lisa.html Wow! You're very lucky! In more ways than one!