Re: Apple ProDOS CP/M disk & file utility

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3af573b0.3061173@news-server.kc.rr.com>,
Dennis Doms <SynABit@kc.invalid> wrote:
 
> In article <9d3fro$t99$1@merope.saaf.se>, pausch@saaf.se (Paul
> Schlyter) wrote:
> 
>> In article <3af53995$1@news.iprimus.com.au>,
>> Mark Cummings <NOTfigjams@primus.com.au> wrote:
>>> Paul,
>>>
>>>>> Universal File Converter (UFC) can do the 1st and part of the 2nd
>>>>> requirement. UFC can transfer between 3.3, CP/M, ProDOS and Pascal. It's
>>>>> a Pascal based program.
>>>>
>>>> Does UFC compile under Turbo Pascal on Apple CP/M ?
>>>
>>>
>>> There is no source code, only the application. It's on a bootable Apple
>>> Pascal 5.25" disk.
>>
>>:-)    ...apparently the word "Pascal" is ambiguous here...
> 
> Somewhat. :)
> 
> "Pascal" on the Apple II often refers to "UCSD Pascal",
 
Yes I know about that.  I bought Apple Pascal in 1980..... didn't do
much useful stuff with it though -- however it did give me new
EPROM's for the disk controller, enabling me to later handle DOS 3.3
when it was released.  And before DOS 3.3 was released I got Apple
(Softcard) CP/M, and was able to immediately use the 16-sector
version....
 
> which includes
> the UCSD Pascal Operating system and virtual machine environment. The
> idea was that the Pascal compiled to pseudocode which ran on a virtual
> processor and environment emulated by the OS.  That way
> the compiled code was "portable" to other machines where the
> supporting OS was available. (Obviously, if you needed and used
> platform-specific features you compromised that portability.)
 
Yep!  And this idea has been reincarnated more recently in Java,
which also is based on the concept of "portable object code" and
"virtual machine".
 
> (actually, I believe there actually was a physical version of the
> "virtual" processor built and marketed that could execute the
> "pseudocode" directly).
 
You're thinking of Western Digital's "Pascal Micro Engine".
Apparently it wasn't a great success....
 
BTW Intel's very first 32-bit microprocessor was not the 80386, but
the iAPX-432.  This was a multi-chip 32-bit CPU which ran some Ada
version of "portable object code".  It followed the spirit of Ada and
did a lot of range and other checks at runtime.  THis was around
1981, and back then Intel promoted the iAPX as their future in 32-bit
microcomputing.  However the iAPX-432 turned out to be really slow --
the 80386 was much faster.  So a few years later, Intel let the
iAPX-432 silently die.
 
Probably the "Pascal Micro ENgine" failed for the same reason: slowness.
 
> So most of the time, when Apple II users refer to "running under
> Pascal", they probably mean the UCSD OS environment, not the Pascal
> language.
 
However you didn't write "running under Pascal" - instead you wrote
"Pascal based", which is a more ambiguous phrase: it could mean
written for Apple/UCSD Pascal, or it could mean written in the Pascla
langauge.
 
> The OS used its own (logical) disk format, distinct from DOS,
> ProDOS, CP/M, etc. on the Apple.
 
I know that!
 
One thing I strongly disliked about the Apple/UCSD Pascal system was
that it was a single-language environment.  I liked the CP/M
environment much better because it allowed you to easily switch
programming languages.  Anyway, one of the first Pascal programs I
wrote for CP/M was a program which read Pascal source files off Apple
Pascal disks - then I had to deal with the details of the Apple
Pascal file system, and also the different sector interleaving of the
Apple Pascal system compared to Apple CP/M.
 
BTW of all the Apple OS'es DOS, ProDOS, Pascal and CP/M, Apple Pascal
had the most primitive file system: it was the only file system which
required the files to be contiguously stored on the disk.  That's why
the Apple Pascal system had a "crunch" command, which moved files as
needed to merge all free parts of the disk into one contiguous space:
on the other Apple OS'es this wasn't needed as they could handle disk
fragmentation.
 
THe simple-mindedness of the Apple Pascal file system was to my
advantage though when I wrote that utility for CP/M which read files
off Apple Pascal disks.
 
-- 
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