Re: What exactly WAS Apple Pascal?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20040716134546.25561.00002041@mb-m29.aol.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:

> Zorin the Lynx wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for the great answers.. I used them to do a bit more research to 
>> learn about the fascinating world of Apple Pascal. The fact that it's 
>> interpreted explains why SmartCom I was on the slow side!
>>
>> It's amazing how much they packed into the tiny memory capacity of the 
>> Apple II back then. A Pascal compiler? Whoah. I have a hard time 
>> imagining it these days with gigs of disk and memory available for us to 
>> waste...
> 
> The "grand idea" behind the UCSD system was not portability
> through P-code, since that was inherited directly from Wirth's P2
> system, but _compactness_ that made it possible to host Pascal
> on a 64KB microcomputer.
> 
> P-code and the P-code interpreter were the means to achieve the
> needed memory efficiency, and the cost was somwhat slower speed.
> 
> A little later, Philippe Kahn saw other ways to achieve the required
> compactness to fit a Pascal IDE into 64K, and he did it using
> Z-80 machine code in Turbo Pascal.

No, Philippe Kahn didn't do that.  The one who did it was Anders
Hejlsberg from Denmark.  Originally his compiler+IDE was sold in
Denmark under the name "Compas Pascal" (later "Poly Pascal") -
although the functionality was almost identical to Turbo Pascal, the
screen layout was a bit different.  And the one-letter IDE commands
had to be followed by pressing the "return" key in Compas/Poly
Pascal; Turbo Pascal removed the requirement of pressing Return after
the one-letter commands.

Anders Hejlsberg also went to the US.  He visited Microsoft and asked
if they were interested in his compiler, but Microsoft SAID NO !!!
(that's almost as when Decca Records said "no" to The Beatles in 1962).
So Anders looked for other US companies, and he found a little basement
company called Borland, which at that time consisted of hardly anyone
but Philippe Kahn.  Kahn was interested - and the rest is history.

In the early days of Turbo Pascal, Compas Pascal and Poly Pascal was
sold in parallell, but only in Scandinavia I believe.

Anyway, nowadays Anders Hejlsberg has been bought back by Microsoft,
and the language C# is a creation by him.  And just like Turbo Pascal
was a non-compliant Pascal, C# is a non-compliant Java.  But C#
cannot be called "Turbo Java" or something which even contains "Java"
because then Microsoft would definitely be sued by Sun who holds the
copyright on that name.  And the standardisation issue is opposite in
C# than it was in Turbo Pascal: while Turbo Pascal deviated from the
Pascal standard, C# ("Turbo Java") is now an ECMA standard while
Sun so far has refused to have Java standardized.
 
> BTW, putting the P-code interpreter into on-chip ROM, as the p-Engine
> did, was hardly making a "hardware" implementation of a P-machine.
> I'm reminded of a time in the early-1980s when some wonk at TI said
> that now that they could burn software into ROM, making it "hardware",
> the industry would finally be freed from software bugs!  ;-)
> 
> -michael
> 
> Check out parallel computing for 8-bit Apples on my
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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