Re: pascal system

["John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.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.

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, 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.

-- 
John Matthews
jmatthews at wright dot edu
www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/