Re: pascal system

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <nospam-687DC8.23195903062006@network-065-024-007-028.columbus.rr.com>,
> In article <e5rv4u$1ubo$1@merope.saaf.se>,
>  pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
> 
>> In article <448091de$0$4494$9b4e6d93@newsread2.arcor-online.net>,
>> Linards Ticmanis  <ticmanis@gmx.de> wrote:
>> 
>>> Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Yes - an implementation of UCSD Pascal was integrated in the Apple Pascal
>>>> system.  It was a compiler, IDE, OS, file system -- all integrated.
>>> 
>>> Actually, if you get your Apple a CP/M card, you might get happier with 
>>> plain ol' Turbo Pascal. Apple Pascal has been described as less than great.
>> 
>> I know -- I immediately switched to TP when it was released, in the early 
>> 80's.
>> 
>> TP was so much faster, both when compiling code and when running the 
>> binaries.
>> Its floating-point arithmetic provided better precision (12 digits compared 
>> to
>> the 7 digits offeret by Apple Pascal -- using Apple Fortran instead was no
>> better since Apple Fortran didn't implement the DOUBLE PRECISION data type).
>> From version 2, TP also offered the dispose operation for heap management
>> and not just the mark/release operations.
>> 
>> Yet there were some parts of the Pascal standard that TP didn't implement.
>> Such as the get and put statements.  And goto was local within a procedure
>> only, not a global goto (somewhat like the longjmp in C) as specified in
>> the standard language.  But guess what?  Apple Pascal had these limitations
>> too.
> 
> Not so. Apple UCSD Pascal implemented get and put with complete 
> generality, as defined in Jensen & Wirth's Report. The absence of these 
> I/O primitives was a significant deficiency in TP that persists to the 
> present.

Apparently I was wrong about Apple UCSD Pascal regarding this.
 
> Implementing goto outside of a nested or recursive scope was a problem 
> in both systems. Apple added several version of exit(), which was what 
> one usually wanted anyway.
> 
>> Compared to Apple Pascal, TP was an obvious winner.  And you didn't have to
>> reboot your computer to switch to another programming language....
> 
> TP was certainly a commercial success,

I didn't mean commercial success, but rather programmer's convenience.

But that's now in the past.  The current version of Borland Delphi and C++
buider is a real pig: expensive, bulky, huge, and slow.  Just like the
Pascal compilers before TP... :-) ....otoh Borland has removed "Turbo"
from the names of their products, which perhaps is a sign of themselves
being conscious about the situation.

> but Apple Pascal was used to 
> develop a fair number of successful applications, too. These included 
> the PFS series, Incredible Jack, VersaForm, QuickFile, Smartcom, Apple 
> Business Graphics, Wizardry and the AppleWorks tutorial. Because the 
> p-system was available on a variety of machines, several of these 
> applications were also cross-platform.

The UCSD P-system predated TP by a few years, so there should have been
some applications deveoped in it.  Btw TP programs were portable too,
if you avoided platform specific features: TP was implemented on
CP/M-80, CP/M-86, PC-DOS and MS-DOS.  For awhile there was even a
Macintosh version of TP.  This was for TP versions 1 to 3 - starting with
TP ver 4, TP went single-platform and targeted only MS-DOS, and later
MS-Windows.

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