18 Feb
2015
18 Feb
'15
8:02 p.m.
On 2/18/15 6:03 PM, Jon Elson wrote:
On 02/18/2015 07:20 PM, drlegendre . wrote:
Back in the late 70's and early 80's I was busily writing a
number of
different
Pascal compilers including one that I wrote while I was at IBM (I think
that was
number 6).
Bill Maddox had actually unearthed one of my middle Pascal compilers that I
wrote while an undergrad at CMU along with all of the documentation. The
claim to fame of that compiler was the development/documentation of the
stack machine (and associated tools, including an interpreter) that was the
target of the compiler. All of it was written in Pascal.
A later version (and significantly restructured/rewritten) was to have an
interpreted stack machine that would be run on C.MMP. That version is
at this point lost to the mists of time. :-(
BTW, all 6 of the Pascal compilers that I wrote were all written in Pascal,
used recursive decent parsers and were self hosted (that is the compiler
when working would compile itself) which was a great test of the entire
tool chain. ;-)
TTFN - Guy
I was introduced to Pascal in a high-school AP
computer science
course ca.
1986. It was a real eye-opener, and seemed quite powerful after only
using
BASIC and the occasional chunks of borrowed 6502 ASM.
Personally, I thought it was an excellent teaching language - at
least for
HS students in the late 1980s.
it was CREATED as a teaching language, and then had
to be extended a bit
to make it usable for professional tasks. I loved it, and created
several
significant pieces of code on it.
I really enjoyed learning to use it - though
as someone who'd had almost ten years' time with BASIC, I found the
emphasis on recursive (sub-)routines to be a bit difficult to grasp.
Something about it just seemed... kludge-y. But functions were a very
welcome addition..
Of course, I've forgotten it all!
I hadn't used Pascal for ages, but recently ported a Gerber to raster
conversion
program that I had written in Borland's Turbo Pascal on Windown 95 and NT
to run under Linux. Just in time, Free Pascal (FPC) came out. It was
specifically
designed to run old Turbo Pascal and DEC Pascal programs with minimal
changes.
I must say that what I knew of Pascal came back VERY quickly, and the
only
problems I had were converting a few really oddball constructs I used
in the old Turbo Pascal program to more modern methods. (I used some
weird tricks when allocating large chunks of memory for raster buffers
and
bitmaps.)