Re: What exactly WAS Apple Pascal?

[Don Bruder <dakidd@sonic.net>]

In article <cd7lc2$q52$1@ottoman.cs.fiu.edu>,
 Zorin the Lynx <yakko@zorin.org> wrote:

> I was an Apple II user for many years in the 80's and early 90's, but I 
> never actually found out exactly what Apple Pascal was, and references 
> online seem to be nonexistent.
> 
> It seemed to be a disk format, operating system, and possibly a 
> programming environment all built into one.. Hell, many utilities could 
> copy files to and from "Apple Pascal" format disks, but what was the 
> environment like?
> 
> Was it a full-featured Pascal compiler? An OS? A file format? Or all of 
> the above? Did anyone here develop in it? What was it like?
> 
> I had exactly ONE program that used Apple Pascal, and that was SmartCom 
> I, which drove my MicroModem IIe. (Note: This was the most useless comm 
> program ever. It had no industry-standard file transfer protocols and 
> had a goofy design. But hey, it got me on BBS's!)
> 
> A pointer to a FAQ or other document explaining Apple Pascal would be 
> great too...
> 

If you know what CodeWarrior is on the Mac, then you've got the basic 
idea of what Apple Pascal was - An early IDE, or "Integrated Development 
Environment" that allowed the user to program the Apple II in Pascal 
rather than BASIC. (Although I never encountered it personally, I did 
hear rumours of a Fortran system that was identical to the Pascal 
system, except that it had compiler/linker/library/etc. modules intended 
for developing in Fortran. Another rumored variant I heard of  but never 
saw myself was COBOL package) 

Whatever the language, it was a compiler that spit out "P-code" bytes - 
Pseudo-assembly code for an imaginary (until later, when someone 
actually cooked up a hardware CPU to match the specs of the until-then 
purely emulated) processor, specced out by UCSD. It also had an editor 
for creating files to feed to the compiler, a file manager that was more 
or less the OS, libraries, a linker, a debugger, and an emulation module 
that would run the P-code emitted by the compiler.

It used its own disk format, catalog structure, and so on, which 
generally made accessing disks outside of the pascal system a pain in 
the rump at best, and next to impossible at worst. Add the "sin" of 
programs written with it not being proper "ready-to-run" standalone 6502 
code (When you ran the program, you actually fired up what amounted to 
an emulator for the pseudo-CPU, then it ran your program on the emulated 
chip) and I thought it had some serious holes. At the same time, it 
could be made quite useful, within its limitations.

-- 
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