Re: Did anybody ever use a "Pascal Area" on a ProFile hard disk?

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Stephen Shaw <xstephenx@apple2.org.za> wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 19:29:39 +1300, Roger Johnstone wrote:
> 
> > By the time I got hold of a copy of Apple Pascal 1.3 (the local Apple
> > dealer was having a junk sale) I had a IIgs, and it ran fine from a 3.5"
> > floppy. No disk swapping needed and it was fast enough for the little bit I
> > did with it, I don't think I even considered trying to install it to the
> > hard drive since it still had to boot from the floppy.
> 
> Is this the ProDOS version?

No.  Apple Pascal 1.3 still uses the UCSD Pascal operating system.  The
only Pascal implementation from Apple which worked under ProDOS was
"Instant Pascal", which was an interpreter rather than a compiler.

Pascal 1.3 improved the device support to allow Pascal to use the ProDOS
block driver in the firmware for disk controller cards (other than 5.25"
controller cards), which means that Pascal 1.3 can work with 3.5" disks,
hard drives and RAM disks provided by standard slot RAM cards, without
having to load any special drivers.

They also made the boot sequence more flexible: you can boot from slot
4, 5 or 6, not just 6.  I forget whether it rearranges the unit numbers
when you boot from slot 4 or 5.

There isn't much point trying to use it with a hard drive, because the
Pascal file system doesn't support subdirectories, has a fixed limit of
about 70 files per volume, and requires files to be stored contiguously
(requiring a "crunch" operation to combine free space).

It wouldn't support more than two partitions on a SCSI hard drive, so
even a 20 MB hard drive would be difficult to fill.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz