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

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

Lazarus I. Long <me@lazilong.com> wrote:

> I'm wondering if anyone would like me to support that in ADFS.

The only purpose of the Pascal Area is to provide multiple virtual
volumes for Apple II Pascal, which must have the Pascal Profile Manager
(PPM) installed on the startup disk.  This arrangement cannot be used to
boot into Pascal, only for data and application storage.  In addition,
PPM never supported any hard drive other than a ProFile (though I
imagine it could have been patched to work with other drives).

Pascal 1.3 can probably boot from a ProFile, but only if it is set up as
a single 5 MB Pascal volume; in this case there is no ProDOS file system
present, so it is not possible to set up a Pascal Area or to use PPM.

I never used this feature, as I didn't really do much with Pascal
outside of working with it at school, and didn't get hold of a ProFile
until I had moved on to the IIgs.

It would have made a huge difference for applications which needed to
deal with a lot of files, due to Pascal's file system limitations: no
subdirectories, a fixed limit in the ballpark of 75 files per volume,
and each file had to be stored contiguously, requiring a "crunch"
operation to merge free space.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz