I'm curious why Larry Tesler and his team from Xerox Parc picked Pascal as
the language to build Lisa on...esp. considering the Alto was a BCPL machine
(forerunner of C).
I know Apple was an early adopter of USCD Pascal...I wonder if had any
influences.
Did Apple write their own compiler?
-Chandra
Lisa 2/5
Lisa 2/10
Lisa 1 :-)
91 Lotus Esprit
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at
classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at
classiccmp.org]
On Behalf Of Fred Cisin
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 3:29 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: lisadraw
On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Chris M wrote:
what were these routines writtenw in originally? (C
presumably I suppose, though one could only wonder why
they werent written in assembly TBW)
MOST of the Lisa software seems to have been written in Pascal.
Part of Job's "we want the next (sic) generation, NOT a repeat of what we
already have!" philosophy that caused him to hire some CS graduates with
NO experience in order to get a fresh approach. Some of them didn't even
know that current Pascal compilers were designed for TEACHING programming,
and did not produce output suitable for real world.