Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

["Mike Pender" <mpender@spamsucks.com>]

Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com> wrote in message
qh4r1ahxw7.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com">news:qh4r1ahxw7.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com...
> "Michael Pender" <mpender@hotmail.com> writes:
> > Apple Pascal was a half-baked implementation of the language that
offered
> > very limited system access.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "half-baked" and "very limited system
access".
> Apple Pascal was a port of UCSD Pascal, and generally offered *more*
> capabilities and system access than standard Pascal as defined in
> _Pascal User Manual and Report_ by Jensen and Wirth.

By "very limited system access" I meant that a person had to "cheat" to be
able to call machine code subroutines from Apple Pascal.  There were ways to
'peek' and 'poke' using pointers, but at the time I couldn't find a way to
call machine code subroutines by address.

Before you respond that access to machine resources wasn't a fault of Apple
Pascal, remember that the other standard Apple languages of the day (integer
basic, applesoft basic, etc.) all provided such access.  Moreover, competing
platform languages such as Turbo Pascal and Microsoft C offered integrated
development environments with tools for analyzing programs with inline
assembler code--although in fairness to Apple, Apple Pascal was *far* more
stable than Microsoft C at that time.

> > It was a compiled Fortran program that
> > inherited all of the limitations of the Fortran language, as well as
those
> > of Pascal.
>
> The compiler was itself written in Pascal, and was derived from the
> Zurich P2 Portable Compiler.  I don't have the source code for Apple
> Pascal, but below I've attached the first few lines of the compiler
> source code (file COMPA.TXT) from UCSD Pascal release I.3.

Apple Pascal is based on UCSD Pascal release II.1 as noted on the splash
screen:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Command: E(dit, R(un, F(ile, C(omp, L(ink, X(ecute, A(ssem, D(ebug,? [1.1]

Welcome FORT1, to Apple II Pascal 1.1

Based on UCSD Pascal II.1

Current date is 16-Jan-80

(C) Apple Computer Inc. 1979, 1980
(C) U.C. Regents 1979
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
One of the reasons I thought Apple Pascal may have been coded in ForTran is
because they named the two disks "FORT1" and "FORT2."

I suppose it *might* just be a coincidence.

- Mike