Re: pascal system

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <1149429794.448365.229870@h76g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com> wrote:

> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
>> True --- Turbo Pascal didn't integrate its own OS, which was a clear
>> advantage.  To summarize: Turbo Pascal was better than Apple Pascal in
>> almost every respect.  Anyone who can think of even one advantage
>> Apple Pascal had over Turbo Pascal?
> 
> Being able to run on a standard Apple II, sans z-80 card was the major
> one.

Unfortunately, Apple Pascal didn't run on a standard Apple II, sans
"language card"....

Anyway, I remembered one actual advantage of Apple Pascal compared to
TP (versions 1 to 3): the ability to create modules (called "units" in
UCSD Pascal jargon - units was a UCSD Pascal extension which was
absent in the Pascal standard), i.e. separately compiled pieces of
code.  Early versions of TP required the whole program in one single
source file available at compilation time.  The limitations due to
this was in TP overcome by $include statements (which allowed the
source to be split up into several files, even though it logically
still was one file) and overlays (if the generated object code became
too large).  And of course TP was so much faster at compiling than
Apple Pascal that usuallyTP was still faster even though it had to
recompile all source code for each new compile.
 
> There was a book published back in the day, that I never owned, that
> was basically the 'Beneath Apple Dos' of Pascal. It included a number
> of patches you could use to speed it up.
> 
> The single biggest performance limitation in Apple Pascal is the
> console I/O. You can fix this with some hackery, and it makes a world
> of difference.
> 
> Another advantage was program size. Using the virtual machine meant
> having a lot more data space, since programs were far more compact than
> native code equivalents.
> 
> At one point I needed more precision in floating point routines, so I
> assembled Woz's 6502 floating point routines into a Pascal UNIT.

If you're referring to the 6502 f.p. routines in the Integer Basic
ROM's -- sorry, they were no help.  They too were 4-byte
floating-point numbers, the more or less standard 32-bit f.p. format
used in e.g.  Apple Pascal.  Perhaps you modified them to extend the
precision?  Or perhaps you instead borrowed the f.p. routines from
Applesoft?  If the latter: they were written not by Woz but by
Microsoft - probably by Gates and/or Allen.

> Was
> quite zippy too. In fact, I really should pull out some of those units
> and put them up for download. There's another that I hacked together to
> allow the use of double hires graphics as well, but it's actually
> written in Pascal and is a little slow for some tasks.
> 
> I think the Apple III version of Pascal used SOS underneath to provide
> its file I/O, removing the need for the dedicated disk format.

-- 
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