Re: What exactly WAS Apple Pascal?

["John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.com>]

In article <cd8bk7$1sjg$1@merope.saaf.se>,
 pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

> In article <cd7lc2$q52$1@ottoman.cs.fiu.edu>,
> Zorin the Lynx  <yakko@zorin.org> wrote:
> 
> > I was an Apple II user for many years in the 80's and early 90's, but I 
> > never actually found out exactly what Apple Pascal was, and references 
> > online seem to be nonexistent.
> > 
> 
[...]
> 
> Everyting in UCSD Pascal, except the P-machine, was written in UCSD
> Pascal: the IDE, the editor, the Pascal compiler, the library
> functions, the assembler.  The assembler was named TLA (The Last
> Assembler) and it was intended to be a universal assembler -
> opcodes/etc for specific CPU's were defined in an accompanying data
> file.  The dream of those who wrote that assembler was obviously that
> no other assembler would ever need to be written -- as we all now
> know, this dream didn't come true.

Uh, the GNU Assembler, GAS, is largely table driven.

Apple Pascal was seminal: Pascal inventor Niklaus Wirth worked 
with Apple to create Object Pascal. Similar to p-code, portable 
bytecode is now all the rage. There was even a command-line 
interpreter (Kernighan & Plaugher, Software Tools), as seen in 
Linux and MacOS.

Everything old is new again!

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