Re: What exactly WAS Apple Pascal?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <nospam-6577BD.09215516072004@news-server-fe-01.columbus.rr.com>,
John B. Matthews <nospam@nospam.com> wrote:
> 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.

...and GAS was written after TLA, right?   Therefore GAS was another
confirmation that TLA wasn't The Last Assembler to be writtten....

I never claimed there would be no other table-driven assembler.....

> 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's one important difference though: the Internet.  Now
portable object code is really useful, since it can be transferred
from one computer to another, not only in theory bot also easily in
real life.

Also: the raw CPU power is now so great that it's far beyond what
most people actually need.  Back when UCSD Pascal was released the
first time, the world's fastest supercomputer was the Cray-1 - it had
a computing power approximately equivalent to a 500 MHz Pentium-III.
The Cray-1 was quite expensive though -- had it been cheap enough
for anyone to buy and had the UCSD system been implemented for
the Cray-1, UCSD Pascal could have taken off too, perhaps.

> There was even a command-line interpreter (Kernighan & Plaugher,
> Software Tools), as seen in Linux and MacOS.
> 
> Everything old is new again!

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