Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

[Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com>]

"Mike Pender" <mpender@spamsucks.com> writes:
> By "very limited system access" I meant that a person had to "cheat" to be
> able to call machine code subroutines from Apple Pascal.

False.  You could easily write assembly code using the provided assembler,
and link it to your Pascal code.

> There were ways to
> 'peek' and 'poke' using pointers, but at the time I couldn't find a way to
> call machine code subroutines by address.

If you really needed to do that, you could write a small piece of assembly
glue to provide a function like call(address).

> Before you respond that access to machine resources wasn't a fault of Apple
> Pascal, remember that the other standard Apple languages of the day (integer
> basic, applesoft basic, etc.) all provided such access.

As did all variants of UCSD Pascal, including Apple Pascal.

One can hardly blame Apple Pascal if you didn't read the documentation.

> One of the reasons I thought Apple Pascal may have been coded in ForTran is
> because they named the two disks "FORT1" and "FORT2."
> 
> I suppose it *might* just be a coincidence.

The FORT1 and FORT2 disks were part of Apple Fortan, not Apple Pascal.
Apple Fortran was a distribution of UCSD p-System Fortran, so it was
Pascal-based.