Re: pascal system

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

> True --- Turbo Pascal didn't integrate its own OS, which was a clear
> advantage.  To summarize: Turbo Pascal was better than Apple Pascal in
> almost every respect.  Anyone who can think of even one advantage
> Apple Pascal had over Turbo Pascal?

Being able to run on a standard Apple II, sans z-80 card was the major
one.

There was a book published back in the day, that I never owned, that
was basically the 'Beneath Apple Dos' of Pascal. It included a number
of patches you could use to speed it up.

The single biggest performance limitation in Apple Pascal is the
console I/O. You can fix this with some hackery, and it makes a world
of difference.

Another advantage was program size. Using the virtual machine meant
having a lot more data space, since programs were far more compact than
native code equivalents.

At one point I needed more precision in floating point routines, so I
assembled Woz's 6502 floating point routines into a Pascal UNIT. Was
quite zippy too. In fact, I really should pull out some of those units
and put them up for download. There's another that I hacked together to
allow the use of double hires graphics as well, but it's actually
written in Pascal and is a little slow for some tasks.

I think the Apple III version of Pascal used SOS underneath to provide
its file I/O, removing the need for the dedicated disk format.