14 ms·

Pascal at Apple

181 points by janvdberg 9y ago

cjensen 9y ago
I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the following function in C without using the address-of operator: struct list *head = (void *) 0; void push_back (struct list *entry) { struct list **p = &head; while (*p != 0) p = &p->next; *p = entry; } Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function. There's no going back, but I wish it was still available for learners. Java is comparable in terms of programmer safety, but has too much ridiculous boilerplate just to write "hello, world".
- sand500 9y ago
  How does Pascal compare to python for absolute begginers?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - shakna 9y ago
    Harder in some ways, because types matter a lot more, private methods and less namespacing. But the IDE makes GUI programming ridiculously easy, something Python can't compare on.
  - eloary 9y ago
    Pascal is a smaller language, and so easier to come to grips with at first glance. The syntax is tailored towards some verbosity which usually appeals to beginners. However, the downside is that you don't have a lot of leverage to do things in Pascal: Python pushes you down a path where you are writing something productive very quickly and can reach into the standard libraries to do many tasks - it makes some things very easy. Pascal requires some time to prepare the solution and encode it in syntax, and it's harder to find what you need, but there is usually code somewhere online that you can adapt. This is a lot to ask of beginners who want to do practical work, though. As of right now Pascal retains a lot of strength in desktop GUI code. In terms of safety/dangerous code, modern Object Pascal style lets you be as dangerous as C if you want, but the default semantics are much more comfortable, and take you away from the danger zone more often. Both Python and Pascal are relatively easy to get up and running with, and have pretty solid, standardized toolchains for industry use: in contrast C and C++ leave the build process relatively undefined and varying between compilers and platforms, which has resulted in a huge amount of friction to get any project building on a new machine.
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    Overall not well. It's statically typed, which can be helpful. And as mentioned, Pascal, was used widely in teaching so one would say well. However! So was Python, in it's ABC infancy. Note that there are multiple Pascals, especially in the late 70s and 80s. Pure, true Pascal was annoying and restrictive [1]. No commercially successful Pascal was pure. The classic was Turbo Pascal which was disdained by purists but enormously successful. It's inventor went on to work on Delphi (a sort of Pascal which is still popular) C#, and Typescript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg 1. e.g. semicolons were separators, not terminators. You'd get a syntax error if you had a semicolon after your last statement of a program/procedure.
  - vbezhenar 9y ago
    IMO it's the best language for absolute beginners, if we are talking about classic Pascal without Borland extensions. It's very small language which could be taught in a few lessons yet it's powerful enough to learn classic data structures and algorithms. The main drawback is that Pascal is not commercially successful, so you'll learn it and move on. Python, on the other side, is widely used, so Python knowledge is useful on its own. Start from Pascal if you want to learn a lot of languages. I specifically would suggest to dive deep after Pascal and learn some assembly language, may be x86. They you'll have good basics and you can learn almost any language you want, C would be good, for example. Main problem with Python IMO is that it's too high-level, it's dynamic, it uses GC. All those things are too far away from real machine code, so if you'll learn Python first, it might be hard to learn low-level programming and it's useful even if you're using JavaScript.
  - utku_karatas2 9y ago
    Although I use Python extensively and started to forget about Pascal (ex Delphi guy here), Pascal is a much better beginner language IMO. Start with Python and you're most likely to be stuck with dynamic typing/runtime mindset and it'll distance you too far away from OS level native land. OTOH starting with Pascal, you'll learn a great deal of low level (well, relatively) stuff and that will make you appreciate the higher level languages when the time comes and will let you leverage them more efficiently. Also as a bonus, a big bonus I think, Pascal will let you feel at home if you ever need C/C++/D in your career.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Not sure if Wirth designed Pascal to be beginner-friendly, but IMO, it is.
- joezydeco 9y ago
  I miss it too. It was my first post-BASIC language. The AP Computer Science exam used to be given in Pascal, BTW.
- boznz 9y ago
  Turbo Pascal was taught at most UK college in the 80's I think most electronic engineers and CS guys who went to school around then were exposed to it and you would be surprised how many PC/DOS programs in the 80's were written in it.
  - phpnode 9y ago
    Not just the 80s, until at least 2000 and probably a lot longer
  - bluedino 9y ago
    Turbo Pascal seemed like the perfect language for writing DOS games in the early 90's. Fast, you didn't need to know low-level things but you could always patch in assembly routines if you needed to.
- FRex 9y ago
  Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal Compiler are available if you really want to play with Pascal. It's super easy and fun to do simple GUI programming in it especially.
- tedajax 9y ago
  Intro to computer science freshman year of high school in 2004 was still using turbo pascal and it was great. Dropping into BGI graphics mode was a great beginner friendly way to draw shapes and make some cool things. It's what got me into game development in earnest. I wish I could get this same setup to teach people with but BGI doesn't work in later versions of Windows.
  - rpeden 9y ago
    I think BGI graphics will still work in DOSBox. I remember having a setup a couple of years ago where I shared a directory between Windows and DOSBox. I'd edit the code in Windows using Sublime Text, and then pop in to DOSBox to build/run it. So although it doesn't quite make BGI graphics based apps run directly on Windows...it's still quick and easy enough to have some fun. I did it specifically to give myself a way to make programming fun again at a time when I was feeling a bit burned out from working on massive, overly complex C# and JavaScript code all day at the office.
    - vram22 9y ago
      Turbo Pascal is, or at least until some time ago, was, also available from the Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero (hat tip to often useless or destructive M&A) Museum (along with other historical software from them, like Turbo C and so on). I had downloaded TP and TC from the Museum and tried them out a bit again some time ago, for old times' sake. Worked okay, IIRC, but I may have only used them for CLI work, not for BGI graphics. Worth a try though, for BGI, even on Windows, without installing DOSBox. Update: Here is the link to the Museum: http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/antiquesoftware http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/antiquesoftware
      - vram22 9y ago
        Note: I should mention that, like it happens on many sites, the links sometimes do not work, or are broken. Caveat lector.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    This is why C++ standard folks want a simple basic 2D library available as part of the standard. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0267r5.pdf http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p026...
- rbehrends 9y ago
  > Just try to implement the following function in C without using the address-of operator: Pascal had `var` arguments, i.e. call-by-reference, which can be used for similar purposes. Call-by-reference isn't a complete replacement for C pointers, of course, but it also avoided the whole host of memory safety issues arising from C's more general model and which plague C to this day. > But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function. That's entirely subjective, I think. As somebody who grew up with Pascal and learned C later, I found the C syntax to be comparatively hard to read. I do favor the Modula-2/Eiffel/Ada approach of having "end" terminators instead of "begin" / "end" blocks (which share the troubles that braces have), though.
- fghvbnvbnfe 9y ago
  I don't understand the extreme focus on brevity, though it does seem to be mentioned regularly. In practice I don't notice a difference between "begin" and "{". It's not something I have to think about, and my typing speed exceeds the speed at which I'm able to determine what to type next. I understand avoiding excessive amounts of large boiler plate where standard patterns are constantly repeated for no particular reason, but that's not a comparable situation to individual keywords.
- vram22 9y ago
  >Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function. I love both C and Pascal, and I'm a guy who has done a lot of both of them. Hey, its possible to like more than one language. With that background, I think your above points are minor (IMO of course) and should not be an issue in deciding between the two. One can easily get used to "begin" and "end" instead of braces, or vice versa. Same for the keywords "procedure" and "function". Plus, editor shortcuts in modern editors should be able to handle that, or a keyboard enhancement tool like AutoHotkey, vim's abbr command, or equivalents in other tools. Better still, use both languages, at different times, as per needs, wants, convenience, etc.
EvanAnderson 9y ago
When opened w/o Javascript you see only the first paragraph and the timeline at the bottom. I almost skipped over this because I thought there wasn't anything interesting there.
- Swizec 9y ago
  When I drive my car without an engine, it only goes downhill. I almost stopped using cars because I thought there was nothing interesting there. It's 2017. Turn on your JavaScript.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    I know 10 years ago turning off Javascript was still a real concern. I tend to be of the mindset that in 2017 a browser without Javascript is like a browser without a mouse/trackpad - technically viable, but no one does it, so depending on Javascript is a given. Know of any good statistics on this however?
    - hyperpape 9y ago
      1.1% of people have it turned off in one measurement: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi....
      - delibes 9y ago
        A slightly more recent UK figure has it at less than 0.1% https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-cookies-javascript/ https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-co... I like to avoid Javascript where possible just to build a nice clean fast page.
      - bitwize 9y ago
        Oh, well, let's all drop everything and accommodate that 1.1%!
      - 9y ago
jzelinskie 9y ago
I've been reading a lot about Niklaus Wirth recently. I read an interesting piece about Oberon I found in an HN archive[0] that mentions Oberon usage on Macs. I'm very tempted to buy "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" after reading a few things about him. I wish there were more instances of "computing in a vacuum" like at ETH. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Iirc Wirth compiler source is online. It's a "single page app" though... Be warned.
- jdswain 9y ago
  I've got that book, it is interesting to read. I also spent quite a bit of time looking at the Oberon system and that has been very educational. Oberon is quite like Pascal, but in some ways simplified even more. He wrote a complete operating system and user interface in Oberon and it is just amazing how much he achieved with very few lines of code. I'm currently attempting to write a C compiler and the complexity is incredible compared to Oberon or Pascal. Sometimes I regret choosing C over Pascal as I'd probably be done now with the compiler, as it is I've only got the parser and preprocessor implemented. Eiffel is another language that didn't gain a lot of popularity but is very interesting to read about. Bertrand Meyer, the creator of Eiffel is now at ETH Zurich, where Wirth spent most of his career. It's a very nice language that didn't achieve a lot of popularity, but some of the ideas, such as preconditions and postconditions, have been used in other systems.
  - TimJYoung 9y ago
    I've written an Object Pascal (the current incarnation that Delphi/FreePascal uses) compiler/transpiler for Object Pascal->JavaScript and yes, it's great language for compiler writers because the language makes the job of the compiler so easy. You have to really go out of your way to make the compilation slow, and there aren't a lot of undefined behaviors or other gotchas that are hard to navigate. Also, I wrote it in Delphi. :-)
- 9y ago
kabdib 9y ago
I joined Apple in 1987, about the time they started ditching Pascal in favor of C. C++ (in the form of CFront) was just starting to be a thing. Apple's Pascal had been extended to the point where there were few true differences between it and C, other than - strings with busted semantics (size being part of the type being a huge mistake, leading to a proliferation of types like Str255, Str32, Str31, Str64, etc). I should add that C's strings were semantically busted, too, and in more dangerous ways. No way to win :-) - nested procedures (not terribly useful in practice, IMHO) - an object syntax, used for Object Pascal and MacApp (a complete, though large and somewhat slow app framework). - some miscellany, like enums and modules Apple extended Pascal pretty extensively, adding pointer arithmetic, address-of, variant functions calls, and a bunch of things I've forgotten. I could write some Pascal, then write some C, and squint and they'd look pretty much the same. Most people shrugged and wrote new code C if they were able, and then moved to C++ when CFront became usable.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  I liked nested functions in Pascal, and put them in D. They turn out to be surprisingly useful: 1. Properly encapsulating their scope, as opposed to having static functions sit awkwardly somewhere else. 2. Factoring out common code within the function. 3. A lot of my need for goto statements vanished with nested functions. 4. Take the address of a nested function, and it serves as a lambda. 5. No need to create "Context" structs to pass local data to them. 6. They replace a lot of what C macros did. 7. They're inlineable, so are not costly. I use them more and more as time goes by. It's a pity C doesn't have them, they'd fit nicely into the language.
  - kkylin 9y ago
    Off-topic, but nested functions are one of my favorite gcc extensions.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      I discovered with C and C++ compilers, if an extension was added that was not in the Standard, nobody would use it - not even the people who requested the extension. It wasn't like the Pascal community, where nobody would use the compiler unless it had a boatload of extensions :-)
thought_alarm 9y ago
I'm reminded of a really great interview with Bill Atkinson where he describes (among many other things) how he initially brought Pascal to Apple and the Apple II. https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m The Pascal bits are from 45:00 to about 50:00. ... My manager at the time said, no, we don't want to do this [Pascal], people are happy with what they got. I overrode him and went to Jobs, and Jobs said "Well, I'm not convinced. I think our users are happy with BASIC and assembly language. But you seem passionate about it. I'll give you one week to prove me otherwise." I was on an airplane within two hours down to UC San Diego and I started porting right away. ... The other thing that happened then is I had to plug in the disk routines, and their system was pretty big and that little 13-sector floppy disk didn't have a lot of capacity. Well, Woz had just come up with a different way of encoding the data on the disk so that we could get more data for the same disk size, and we needed the 16-sector disk routines. And so Woz came down, and I was there... I had never bothered to get a motel because I slept on the bench when I wasn't working. This is in the computer science lab at UC San Diego. I was busy, I didn't have time to go sleep. But Woz came down, and I got to interact with him and it was really fun because he was working on installing these 16-sector disk driver routines, and he'd go 'type type type type type' -- and he didn't type in assembly language and have it assembled. No, he'd type in 6502 machine code. Hex. -- He'd type in hex, and then, you know, watching him type and he'd go 'type type type' -- pause -- 'type type type type', and when he finished I asked him what was the pause? And he said "forward branch, seven instructions, I had to compute the offset before I continued". So, he didn't back-patch the offset, he actually looked at what he was going to be typing, knew how many bytes it would take... he was brilliant.
- juliangamble 9y ago
  This is one of the great quotes in the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs book: Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, "Since you're so passionate about it, I'll give you six days to prove me wrong." He did, and Jobs respected him ever after. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&lpg=PT143&dq=since+you%27re+so+passionate+about+it+i%27ll+give+you+six+days+to+prove+me+wrong&source=bl&ots=pPGjkRYz7j&sig=kTkSRb7bPLncBAWKuLpmxrGZIXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis3dyt65vVAhXLybwKHRodCQgQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=since%20you're%20so%20passionate%20about%20it%20i'll%20give%20you%20six%20days%20to%20prove%20me%20wrong&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&l...
carapace 9y ago
Please, everybody, if you haven't read it, stop now, get a copy of "Humane Interface", spend the weekend reading it, and then come in Monday and apply it.
robterrell 9y ago
It may seem quaint now, but Apple Pascal was a serious tool. I took AP Computer Science in 1985 and the language taught was UCSD Pascal on the Apple ][+. (In the 80's, C on an Apple ][ was impossible. The only C compiler you could get was for a card that went in the expansion slot that included a Z80 processor.) When I went to college in 1986, Pascal was the primary language used in all entry-level courses at Virginia Tech. (Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC -- $5 at the student stores, if you brought your own floppy. I'm the weirdo who brought a Mac Plus to school and used Lightspeed/Think Pascal.) All of the classic Mac APIs used pascal calling conventions. Pascal continued to be the language used for serious Mac development for a long time. I can't find any references via Google, but Apple had an internal language called "Classcal" which I was told was "pascal with classes". Eventually Think Pascal adopted this object-oriented Pascal syntax. Just today I was thinking about how great it was coding in Lightspeed Pascal, when I was trying to get VS Code to display ligatures. Lightspeed Pascal parsed the AST and auto-formatted all your code for you. Tabs became tab stops, like a word processor. I still miss that; hard to believe today we're still fighting about tabs v. spaces.
- rpeden 9y ago
  Is Clascal the language you're thinking of?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
  - robterrell 9y ago
    Yes! That's it. MPW was also (contemporaneously) great for Pascal.
- rbehrends 9y ago
  A major issue was that C compilers were actually fairly ill-suited for 8-bit processors with limited memory, limited processing power, and at most a floppy disk (if that) for external storage. Pascal was designed to allow single pass compilation of programs, while the C preprocessor alone was a source of what was immense overhead at that time. On CP/M, Turbo Pascal blew all C compilers out of the water in terms of compilation speed. The one C compiler I had on a ZX Spectrum at the time did not actually implement the full language so that you'd have some memory left over (I remember that the C type cast syntax was replaced with a keyword in order to simplify the parser, for example). That said, UCSD-Pascal on an Apple II (which we got to use in school as part of our regular computer science course), was not all that convincing as an implementation (even if the system as a whole was fairly impressive). Because it used a bytecode interpreter (even if that bytecode interpreter leveraged type information and was much faster than a bytecode interpreter for a dynamically typed language), execution speed – including that of the development environment, which was written in UCSD-Pascal itself – was still pretty sluggish in comparison to an actually compiled language. (The UCSD p-code in principle also allowed compilation to native code, but at least the system I had access to – that was in the early 80s – didn't support that.) But it was still more pleasant than many other compilers, and that was at a time when cassette recorders were often still the primary external storage medium, so people were more tolerant, when their point of comparison was systems that literally included source code from cassette tape at compile time, because for large programs you couldn't fit both the source code and the object code into memory at the same time.
dfan 9y ago
In order to run Apple Pascal on my Apple ][+, I had to buy a "language card". This was bigger than an index card (maybe 3 by 6 inches) and added sixteen whole kilobytes to your computer's RAM, beefing it up to a massive 64K and rendering it capable of running such a system hog as Apple Pascal. I think it was about a hundred bucks in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, the Apple ][+ could only display 40 columns on screen, where of course by "screen" I mean "television". (You could buy another big card to give you enough memory to display 80 columns at a time, but who had the cash to make another huge purchase like that?). Of course, 40 columns isn't enough to write in a structured programming language with indentation like Pascal, and in fact the Pascal program itself supported logical lines of up to 80 characters. This issue was resolved as brilliantly as you might expect. You could toggle between looking at the left half of your program (cut off at the 40-character mark) or the right half. I'm not kidding.
- ribs 9y ago
  Oh, I remember, although in my mind's eye, the 16K expansion card was bigger, about as big as a graphics card of today.
  - flomo 9y ago
    I was lucky enough to have a second hand Apple ][ from a "hacker", it had a ][+ rom and was pretty much loaded to the gills with a "z80 softcard" and etc. The slot 3 80-column card also had 16K RAM and was the only full-sized card in the machine. (It also came with full documentation if you wanted to burn a different font into a ROM.) So I had a 64K machine, but slot 0 was empty. Unfortunately I never had docs for Pascal, so I never bothered learning it and instead was mentally mutilated by BASIC. A full-sized Apple card was a good bit less tall than a PC AT card and had to be angled to fit the case. e.g. [0] [0] http://www.applelogic.org/files/AVOChires.jpg http://www.applelogic.org/files/AVOChires.jpg
    - walshemj 9y ago
      Back in the day THE Gucci accessory for an Apple ][ was the clear Perspex top cover to show off your collection of expansion cards
SwellJoe 9y ago
My first programming language was (obviously) BASIC, but my second was Pascal. I took AP computer programming in high school and it was taught with Pascal on Apple II and IIe computers. My dad later bought me Turbo Pascal for the PC (I remember a yellow box with "+ Objects" on it, so it must have been 5.5 Pro in 1989), and I used it on his machine, but never did much with it other than tinker. I finally got what I viewed as a real programming setup when I got DICE (Dillon's Integrated C Environment) for my Amiga a couple years later. Still didn't do much more than tinker, though, until I got a Linux box a couple years after that and source code for everything was available for poking at. Anyway, Pascal was very common in education back then and Apply was very common in education...ergo, Apple and Pascal went together a lot of the time.
Animats 9y ago
The page isn't rendering properly with ad blocking. The original memo is being served from Storify. Where is it from? The Internet Archive. Here's the original, which reads better directly from the Archive.[1] [1] https://archive.org/details/Apple_Pascal_History_DTC_1992 https://archive.org/details/Apple_Pascal_History_DTC_1992
Lerc 9y ago
Does the p-code compiler self host? I've been working on an emulator for an imaginary 8-bit machine (AVR instruction set), and have been looking for languafge options to run on it. In the last few days, I've gotten FreePascal compiling for it, bit I would also like to have languages that I can compile or interpret on the machine itself.
rcarmo 9y ago
I wrote a fair amount of Pascal in my 680x0 Mac days, both in MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) and THINK Pascal. Back then Modula-2 was available on VAXen and "big" machines, but Pascal was almost "portable" across Mac/PC/VAXen and was amazingly fast, so it was pretty fun. I eventually moved to C (also using THINK C - see retrospective link below for a sample of those heady times) and never looked back until a couple of weeks ago I set up Lazarus for my kid to play with (there are too many Python GUI development options, and none halfway as good). Lazarus is _amazing_ (if somewhat odd in today's world), and I really wish we had more IDEs like it instead of all the crappy Electron/web approaches for building desktop apps. It builds fast, tiny, entirely native apps in less than a second, and is an excellent example of how far Pascal went despite falling off the mainstream wagon. (If anyone knows of anything like it for cross-platform desktop apps, let me know, I'd love to try it out) - Link about early C dev on the Mac, that also mentions MPW and Pascal in passing - https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/what-was-the-first-c-compiler-for-the-mac https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/what...
- lispm 9y ago
  I have used Modula 2 on my Apple II. It ran under the UCSD-p machine system.
- philippeback 9y ago
  Lazarus: definitely cool
- dom96 9y ago
  I don't know anything like Lazarus, but I do know a language that shares many of the characteristics of Pascal (small, fast, native binaries). That language is Nim and I think there is a good chance we could get something like Lazarus out of it.
  - rcarmo 9y ago
    If you can do Visual Basic-like forms with it... that's the main appeal of Lazarus for me right now - instant native GUI development.
malkia 9y ago
I've started with Basic, some assembly (CALL-151) on my Apple ][ clone (Pravetz 8C), but as soon as I got my hands on IBM PC/XT (or AT) Turbo Pascal (the 30-40kb turbo.com) was just the right choice. It fit on one disk, there was plenty more, while a Microsoft C/C++ compiler and linker each took a whole separate disk. The best thing I've loved were the .TPU files (but not sure whether TP4 or TP5 had them truly). There were no .h files to be included, or .lib (.a) to be added, it worked just magically well (with some limitations). I've moved to C/C++ later simply because, well it's a stupid reason. I was writing a "File Manager" like app for DOS (just single column, not like Norton Commander, FAR or Midnight Commander), and the only function in Turbo Pascal 5.0 to move files was just renaming a file in the same folder... Had I known about inline assembly and be more brave, I would've stayed in Pascal Land (And I was already familiar with Ralph Brown's Interrupt List)... But hey, this stupid reason moved me to C/C++ as the builtin function there did it... then again, soon after that I've started using more and more inline assembly. I love C/C++ now (especially C), and where I used to be really good at Pascal, I might have some hurdles reading pascal code today. Delphi was my last stop, and while I like it, I switched to video game development, and Pascal was not much used there (... Age Of Wonders I believe was written in some form of Pascal and possibly some other games,... Also part of Xoreax's IncrediBuild might've been, especially the part that does the C/C++ header processing, I think it was since we had issues with it, and while debugging found something pascal-ish in there, but don't remember now).
swombat 9y ago
I learned to program with Turbo Pascal on my PC back in the early 90s. Language lite is fun. And yet, when I clicked on this part of me was really just hoping this was referring to nvidia's Pascal architecture, a hint that maybe they were finally dropping the Radeon line and getting some decent video cards into their machines. One can but dream I guess.
jenkstom 9y ago
Pascal was one of my favorite languages (in the form of Object Pascal). I made a living from it for decades. But Borland and a long succession of companies killed it through mismanagement. It does still exist in the form of freepascal and lazarus, but I've moved on to c#. Pascal was great for people who didn't have curly braces in their muscle memory. But I suppose I've gone fully over to the dark side now.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
A lot of us seem to miss Pascal. Makes me wonder if it'll ever have a resurgence.
jonjacky 9y ago
The UCSD Pascal system, which ran on Apple II and many other computers in the late 70s - early 80s, always displayed a menu (for whatever program was running) across the top line of the screen. I wonder if that was the inspiration for the Macintosh menu bar.
fogus 9y ago
For those of you still interested in this story, the author of the original memo David Craig commented with clarifications, corrections, and further information. It's a truly epic comment. http://blog.fogus.me/2017/07/20/pascal-at-apple/#comment-808933 http://blog.fogus.me/2017/07/20/pascal-at-apple/#comment-808...

181 points by janvdberg 9y ago

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the following function in C without using the address-of operator: struct list *head = (void *) 0; void push_back (struct list *entry) { struct list **p = &head; while (*p != 0) p = &p->next; *p = entry; } Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function. There's no going back, but I wish it was still available for learners. Java is comparable in terms of programmer safety, but has too much ridiculous boilerplate just to write "hello, world".

sand500 9y ago
How does Pascal compare to python for absolute begginers?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- shakna 9y ago
  Harder in some ways, because types matter a lot more, private methods and less namespacing. But the IDE makes GUI programming ridiculously easy, something Python can't compare on.
- eloary 9y ago
  Pascal is a smaller language, and so easier to come to grips with at first glance. The syntax is tailored towards some verbosity which usually appeals to beginners. However, the downside is that you don't have a lot of leverage to do things in Pascal: Python pushes you down a path where you are writing something productive very quickly and can reach into the standard libraries to do many tasks - it makes some things very easy. Pascal requires some time to prepare the solution and encode it in syntax, and it's harder to find what you need, but there is usually code somewhere online that you can adapt. This is a lot to ask of beginners who want to do practical work, though. As of right now Pascal retains a lot of strength in desktop GUI code. In terms of safety/dangerous code, modern Object Pascal style lets you be as dangerous as C if you want, but the default semantics are much more comfortable, and take you away from the danger zone more often. Both Python and Pascal are relatively easy to get up and running with, and have pretty solid, standardized toolchains for industry use: in contrast C and C++ leave the build process relatively undefined and varying between compilers and platforms, which has resulted in a huge amount of friction to get any project building on a new machine.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Overall not well. It's statically typed, which can be helpful. And as mentioned, Pascal, was used widely in teaching so one would say well. However! So was Python, in it's ABC infancy. Note that there are multiple Pascals, especially in the late 70s and 80s. Pure, true Pascal was annoying and restrictive [1]. No commercially successful Pascal was pure. The classic was Turbo Pascal which was disdained by purists but enormously successful. It's inventor went on to work on Delphi (a sort of Pascal which is still popular) C#, and Typescript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg 1. e.g. semicolons were separators, not terminators. You'd get a syntax error if you had a semicolon after your last statement of a program/procedure.
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  IMO it's the best language for absolute beginners, if we are talking about classic Pascal without Borland extensions. It's very small language which could be taught in a few lessons yet it's powerful enough to learn classic data structures and algorithms. The main drawback is that Pascal is not commercially successful, so you'll learn it and move on. Python, on the other side, is widely used, so Python knowledge is useful on its own. Start from Pascal if you want to learn a lot of languages. I specifically would suggest to dive deep after Pascal and learn some assembly language, may be x86. They you'll have good basics and you can learn almost any language you want, C would be good, for example. Main problem with Python IMO is that it's too high-level, it's dynamic, it uses GC. All those things are too far away from real machine code, so if you'll learn Python first, it might be hard to learn low-level programming and it's useful even if you're using JavaScript.
- utku_karatas2 9y ago
  Although I use Python extensively and started to forget about Pascal (ex Delphi guy here), Pascal is a much better beginner language IMO. Start with Python and you're most likely to be stuck with dynamic typing/runtime mindset and it'll distance you too far away from OS level native land. OTOH starting with Pascal, you'll learn a great deal of low level (well, relatively) stuff and that will make you appreciate the higher level languages when the time comes and will let you leverage them more efficiently. Also as a bonus, a big bonus I think, Pascal will let you feel at home if you ever need C/C++/D in your career.
- vram22 9y ago
  Not sure if Wirth designed Pascal to be beginner-friendly, but IMO, it is.
joezydeco 9y ago
I miss it too. It was my first post-BASIC language. The AP Computer Science exam used to be given in Pascal, BTW.
boznz 9y ago
Turbo Pascal was taught at most UK college in the 80's I think most electronic engineers and CS guys who went to school around then were exposed to it and you would be surprised how many PC/DOS programs in the 80's were written in it.
- phpnode 9y ago
  Not just the 80s, until at least 2000 and probably a lot longer
- bluedino 9y ago
  Turbo Pascal seemed like the perfect language for writing DOS games in the early 90's. Fast, you didn't need to know low-level things but you could always patch in assembly routines if you needed to.
FRex 9y ago
Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal Compiler are available if you really want to play with Pascal. It's super easy and fun to do simple GUI programming in it especially.
tedajax 9y ago
Intro to computer science freshman year of high school in 2004 was still using turbo pascal and it was great. Dropping into BGI graphics mode was a great beginner friendly way to draw shapes and make some cool things. It's what got me into game development in earnest. I wish I could get this same setup to teach people with but BGI doesn't work in later versions of Windows.
- rpeden 9y ago
  I think BGI graphics will still work in DOSBox. I remember having a setup a couple of years ago where I shared a directory between Windows and DOSBox. I'd edit the code in Windows using Sublime Text, and then pop in to DOSBox to build/run it. So although it doesn't quite make BGI graphics based apps run directly on Windows...it's still quick and easy enough to have some fun. I did it specifically to give myself a way to make programming fun again at a time when I was feeling a bit burned out from working on massive, overly complex C# and JavaScript code all day at the office.
  - vram22 9y ago
    Turbo Pascal is, or at least until some time ago, was, also available from the Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero (hat tip to often useless or destructive M&A) Museum (along with other historical software from them, like Turbo C and so on). I had downloaded TP and TC from the Museum and tried them out a bit again some time ago, for old times' sake. Worked okay, IIRC, but I may have only used them for CLI work, not for BGI graphics. Worth a try though, for BGI, even on Windows, without installing DOSBox. Update: Here is the link to the Museum: http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/antiquesoftware http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/antiquesoftware
    - vram22 9y ago
      Note: I should mention that, like it happens on many sites, the links sometimes do not work, or are broken. Caveat lector.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  This is why C++ standard folks want a simple basic 2D library available as part of the standard. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p0267r5.pdf http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/p026...
rbehrends 9y ago
> Just try to implement the following function in C without using the address-of operator: Pascal had `var` arguments, i.e. call-by-reference, which can be used for similar purposes. Call-by-reference isn't a complete replacement for C pointers, of course, but it also avoided the whole host of memory safety issues arising from C's more general model and which plague C to this day. > But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function. That's entirely subjective, I think. As somebody who grew up with Pascal and learned C later, I found the C syntax to be comparatively hard to read. I do favor the Modula-2/Eiffel/Ada approach of having "end" terminators instead of "begin" / "end" blocks (which share the troubles that braces have), though.
fghvbnvbnfe 9y ago
I don't understand the extreme focus on brevity, though it does seem to be mentioned regularly. In practice I don't notice a difference between "begin" and "{". It's not something I have to think about, and my typing speed exceeds the speed at which I'm able to determine what to type next. I understand avoiding excessive amounts of large boiler plate where standard patterns are constantly repeated for no particular reason, but that's not a comparable situation to individual keywords.
vram22 9y ago
>Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function. I love both C and Pascal, and I'm a guy who has done a lot of both of them. Hey, its possible to like more than one language. With that background, I think your above points are minor (IMO of course) and should not be an issue in deciding between the two. One can easily get used to "begin" and "end" instead of braces, or vice versa. Same for the keywords "procedure" and "function". Plus, editor shortcuts in modern editors should be able to handle that, or a keyboard enhancement tool like AutoHotkey, vim's abbr command, or equivalents in other tools. Better still, use both languages, at different times, as per needs, wants, convenience, etc.

EvanAnderson 9y ago

When opened w/o Javascript you see only the first paragraph and the timeline at the bottom. I almost skipped over this because I thought there wasn't anything interesting there.

Swizec 9y ago
When I drive my car without an engine, it only goes downhill. I almost stopped using cars because I thought there was nothing interesting there. It's 2017. Turn on your JavaScript.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  I know 10 years ago turning off Javascript was still a real concern. I tend to be of the mindset that in 2017 a browser without Javascript is like a browser without a mouse/trackpad - technically viable, but no one does it, so depending on Javascript is a given. Know of any good statistics on this however?
  - hyperpape 9y ago
    1.1% of people have it turned off in one measurement: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi....
    - delibes 9y ago
      A slightly more recent UK figure has it at less than 0.1% https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-cookies-javascript/ https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-co... I like to avoid Javascript where possible just to build a nice clean fast page.
    - bitwize 9y ago
      Oh, well, let's all drop everything and accommodate that 1.1%!
    - 9y ago

jzelinskie 9y ago

I've been reading a lot about Niklaus Wirth recently. I read an interesting piece about Oberon I found in an HN archive[0] that mentions Oberon usage on Macs. I'm very tempted to buy "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" after reading a few things about him. I wish there were more instances of "computing in a vacuum" like at ETH. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486

agumonkey 9y ago
Iirc Wirth compiler source is online. It's a "single page app" though... Be warned.
jdswain 9y ago
I've got that book, it is interesting to read. I also spent quite a bit of time looking at the Oberon system and that has been very educational. Oberon is quite like Pascal, but in some ways simplified even more. He wrote a complete operating system and user interface in Oberon and it is just amazing how much he achieved with very few lines of code. I'm currently attempting to write a C compiler and the complexity is incredible compared to Oberon or Pascal. Sometimes I regret choosing C over Pascal as I'd probably be done now with the compiler, as it is I've only got the parser and preprocessor implemented. Eiffel is another language that didn't gain a lot of popularity but is very interesting to read about. Bertrand Meyer, the creator of Eiffel is now at ETH Zurich, where Wirth spent most of his career. It's a very nice language that didn't achieve a lot of popularity, but some of the ideas, such as preconditions and postconditions, have been used in other systems.
- TimJYoung 9y ago
  I've written an Object Pascal (the current incarnation that Delphi/FreePascal uses) compiler/transpiler for Object Pascal->JavaScript and yes, it's great language for compiler writers because the language makes the job of the compiler so easy. You have to really go out of your way to make the compilation slow, and there aren't a lot of undefined behaviors or other gotchas that are hard to navigate. Also, I wrote it in Delphi. :-)
9y ago

kabdib 9y ago

I joined Apple in 1987, about the time they started ditching Pascal in favor of C. C++ (in the form of CFront) was just starting to be a thing. Apple's Pascal had been extended to the point where there were few true differences between it and C, other than - strings with busted semantics (size being part of the type being a huge mistake, leading to a proliferation of types like Str255, Str32, Str31, Str64, etc). I should add that C's strings were semantically busted, too, and in more dangerous ways. No way to win :-) - nested procedures (not terribly useful in practice, IMHO) - an object syntax, used for Object Pascal and MacApp (a complete, though large and somewhat slow app framework). - some miscellany, like enums and modules Apple extended Pascal pretty extensively, adding pointer arithmetic, address-of, variant functions calls, and a bunch of things I've forgotten. I could write some Pascal, then write some C, and squint and they'd look pretty much the same. Most people shrugged and wrote new code C if they were able, and then moved to C++ when CFront became usable.

WalterBright 9y ago
I liked nested functions in Pascal, and put them in D. They turn out to be surprisingly useful: 1. Properly encapsulating their scope, as opposed to having static functions sit awkwardly somewhere else. 2. Factoring out common code within the function. 3. A lot of my need for goto statements vanished with nested functions. 4. Take the address of a nested function, and it serves as a lambda. 5. No need to create "Context" structs to pass local data to them. 6. They replace a lot of what C macros did. 7. They're inlineable, so are not costly. I use them more and more as time goes by. It's a pity C doesn't have them, they'd fit nicely into the language.
- kkylin 9y ago
  Off-topic, but nested functions are one of my favorite gcc extensions.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    I discovered with C and C++ compilers, if an extension was added that was not in the Standard, nobody would use it - not even the people who requested the extension. It wasn't like the Pascal community, where nobody would use the compiler unless it had a boatload of extensions :-)

thought_alarm 9y ago

I'm reminded of a really great interview with Bill Atkinson where he describes (among many other things) how he initially brought Pascal to Apple and the Apple II. https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m The Pascal bits are from 45:00 to about 50:00. ... My manager at the time said, no, we don't want to do this [Pascal], people are happy with what they got. I overrode him and went to Jobs, and Jobs said "Well, I'm not convinced. I think our users are happy with BASIC and assembly language. But you seem passionate about it. I'll give you one week to prove me otherwise." I was on an airplane within two hours down to UC San Diego and I started porting right away. ... The other thing that happened then is I had to plug in the disk routines, and their system was pretty big and that little 13-sector floppy disk didn't have a lot of capacity. Well, Woz had just come up with a different way of encoding the data on the disk so that we could get more data for the same disk size, and we needed the 16-sector disk routines. And so Woz came down, and I was there... I had never bothered to get a motel because I slept on the bench when I wasn't working. This is in the computer science lab at UC San Diego. I was busy, I didn't have time to go sleep. But Woz came down, and I got to interact with him and it was really fun because he was working on installing these 16-sector disk driver routines, and he'd go 'type type type type type' -- and he didn't type in assembly language and have it assembled. No, he'd type in 6502 machine code. Hex. -- He'd type in hex, and then, you know, watching him type and he'd go 'type type type' -- pause -- 'type type type type', and when he finished I asked him what was the pause? And he said "forward branch, seven instructions, I had to compute the offset before I continued". So, he didn't back-patch the offset, he actually looked at what he was going to be typing, knew how many bytes it would take... he was brilliant.

juliangamble 9y ago
This is one of the great quotes in the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs book: Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, "Since you're so passionate about it, I'll give you six days to prove me wrong." He did, and Jobs respected him ever after. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&lpg=PT143&dq=since+you%27re+so+passionate+about+it+i%27ll+give+you+six+days+to+prove+me+wrong&source=bl&ots=pPGjkRYz7j&sig=kTkSRb7bPLncBAWKuLpmxrGZIXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis3dyt65vVAhXLybwKHRodCQgQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=since%20you're%20so%20passionate%20about%20it%20i'll%20give%20you%20six%20days%20to%20prove%20me%20wrong&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&l...

carapace 9y ago

Please, everybody, if you haven't read it, stop now, get a copy of "Humane Interface", spend the weekend reading it, and then come in Monday and apply it.

robterrell 9y ago

It may seem quaint now, but Apple Pascal was a serious tool. I took AP Computer Science in 1985 and the language taught was UCSD Pascal on the Apple ][+. (In the 80's, C on an Apple ][ was impossible. The only C compiler you could get was for a card that went in the expansion slot that included a Z80 processor.) When I went to college in 1986, Pascal was the primary language used in all entry-level courses at Virginia Tech. (Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC -- $5 at the student stores, if you brought your own floppy. I'm the weirdo who brought a Mac Plus to school and used Lightspeed/Think Pascal.) All of the classic Mac APIs used pascal calling conventions. Pascal continued to be the language used for serious Mac development for a long time. I can't find any references via Google, but Apple had an internal language called "Classcal" which I was told was "pascal with classes". Eventually Think Pascal adopted this object-oriented Pascal syntax. Just today I was thinking about how great it was coding in Lightspeed Pascal, when I was trying to get VS Code to display ligatures. Lightspeed Pascal parsed the AST and auto-formatted all your code for you. Tabs became tab stops, like a word processor. I still miss that; hard to believe today we're still fighting about tabs v. spaces.

rpeden 9y ago
Is Clascal the language you're thinking of?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
- robterrell 9y ago
  Yes! That's it. MPW was also (contemporaneously) great for Pascal.
rbehrends 9y ago
A major issue was that C compilers were actually fairly ill-suited for 8-bit processors with limited memory, limited processing power, and at most a floppy disk (if that) for external storage. Pascal was designed to allow single pass compilation of programs, while the C preprocessor alone was a source of what was immense overhead at that time. On CP/M, Turbo Pascal blew all C compilers out of the water in terms of compilation speed. The one C compiler I had on a ZX Spectrum at the time did not actually implement the full language so that you'd have some memory left over (I remember that the C type cast syntax was replaced with a keyword in order to simplify the parser, for example). That said, UCSD-Pascal on an Apple II (which we got to use in school as part of our regular computer science course), was not all that convincing as an implementation (even if the system as a whole was fairly impressive). Because it used a bytecode interpreter (even if that bytecode interpreter leveraged type information and was much faster than a bytecode interpreter for a dynamically typed language), execution speed – including that of the development environment, which was written in UCSD-Pascal itself – was still pretty sluggish in comparison to an actually compiled language. (The UCSD p-code in principle also allowed compilation to native code, but at least the system I had access to – that was in the early 80s – didn't support that.) But it was still more pleasant than many other compilers, and that was at a time when cassette recorders were often still the primary external storage medium, so people were more tolerant, when their point of comparison was systems that literally included source code from cassette tape at compile time, because for large programs you couldn't fit both the source code and the object code into memory at the same time.

dfan 9y ago

In order to run Apple Pascal on my Apple ][+, I had to buy a "language card". This was bigger than an index card (maybe 3 by 6 inches) and added sixteen whole kilobytes to your computer's RAM, beefing it up to a massive 64K and rendering it capable of running such a system hog as Apple Pascal. I think it was about a hundred bucks in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, the Apple ][+ could only display 40 columns on screen, where of course by "screen" I mean "television". (You could buy another big card to give you enough memory to display 80 columns at a time, but who had the cash to make another huge purchase like that?). Of course, 40 columns isn't enough to write in a structured programming language with indentation like Pascal, and in fact the Pascal program itself supported logical lines of up to 80 characters. This issue was resolved as brilliantly as you might expect. You could toggle between looking at the left half of your program (cut off at the 40-character mark) or the right half. I'm not kidding.

ribs 9y ago
Oh, I remember, although in my mind's eye, the 16K expansion card was bigger, about as big as a graphics card of today.
- flomo 9y ago
  I was lucky enough to have a second hand Apple ][ from a "hacker", it had a ][+ rom and was pretty much loaded to the gills with a "z80 softcard" and etc. The slot 3 80-column card also had 16K RAM and was the only full-sized card in the machine. (It also came with full documentation if you wanted to burn a different font into a ROM.) So I had a 64K machine, but slot 0 was empty. Unfortunately I never had docs for Pascal, so I never bothered learning it and instead was mentally mutilated by BASIC. A full-sized Apple card was a good bit less tall than a PC AT card and had to be angled to fit the case. e.g. [0] [0] http://www.applelogic.org/files/AVOChires.jpg http://www.applelogic.org/files/AVOChires.jpg
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Back in the day THE Gucci accessory for an Apple ][ was the clear Perspex top cover to show off your collection of expansion cards

SwellJoe 9y ago

My first programming language was (obviously) BASIC, but my second was Pascal. I took AP computer programming in high school and it was taught with Pascal on Apple II and IIe computers. My dad later bought me Turbo Pascal for the PC (I remember a yellow box with "+ Objects" on it, so it must have been 5.5 Pro in 1989), and I used it on his machine, but never did much with it other than tinker. I finally got what I viewed as a real programming setup when I got DICE (Dillon's Integrated C Environment) for my Amiga a couple years later. Still didn't do much more than tinker, though, until I got a Linux box a couple years after that and source code for everything was available for poking at. Anyway, Pascal was very common in education back then and Apply was very common in education...ergo, Apple and Pascal went together a lot of the time.

Animats 9y ago

The page isn't rendering properly with ad blocking. The original memo is being served from Storify. Where is it from? The Internet Archive. Here's the original, which reads better directly from the Archive.[1] [1] https://archive.org/details/Apple_Pascal_History_DTC_1992 https://archive.org/details/Apple_Pascal_History_DTC_1992

Lerc 9y ago

Does the p-code compiler self host? I've been working on an emulator for an imaginary 8-bit machine (AVR instruction set), and have been looking for languafge options to run on it. In the last few days, I've gotten FreePascal compiling for it, bit I would also like to have languages that I can compile or interpret on the machine itself.

rcarmo 9y ago

I wrote a fair amount of Pascal in my 680x0 Mac days, both in MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) and THINK Pascal. Back then Modula-2 was available on VAXen and "big" machines, but Pascal was almost "portable" across Mac/PC/VAXen and was amazingly fast, so it was pretty fun. I eventually moved to C (also using THINK C - see retrospective link below for a sample of those heady times) and never looked back until a couple of weeks ago I set up Lazarus for my kid to play with (there are too many Python GUI development options, and none halfway as good). Lazarus is _amazing_ (if somewhat odd in today's world), and I really wish we had more IDEs like it instead of all the crappy Electron/web approaches for building desktop apps. It builds fast, tiny, entirely native apps in less than a second, and is an excellent example of how far Pascal went despite falling off the mainstream wagon. (If anyone knows of anything like it for cross-platform desktop apps, let me know, I'd love to try it out) - Link about early C dev on the Mac, that also mentions MPW and Pascal in passing - https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/what-was-the-first-c-compiler-for-the-mac https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/3213/what...

lispm 9y ago
I have used Modula 2 on my Apple II. It ran under the UCSD-p machine system.
philippeback 9y ago
Lazarus: definitely cool
dom96 9y ago
I don't know anything like Lazarus, but I do know a language that shares many of the characteristics of Pascal (small, fast, native binaries). That language is Nim and I think there is a good chance we could get something like Lazarus out of it.
- rcarmo 9y ago
  If you can do Visual Basic-like forms with it... that's the main appeal of Lazarus for me right now - instant native GUI development.

malkia 9y ago

I've started with Basic, some assembly (CALL-151) on my Apple ][ clone (Pravetz 8C), but as soon as I got my hands on IBM PC/XT (or AT) Turbo Pascal (the 30-40kb turbo.com) was just the right choice. It fit on one disk, there was plenty more, while a Microsoft C/C++ compiler and linker each took a whole separate disk. The best thing I've loved were the .TPU files (but not sure whether TP4 or TP5 had them truly). There were no .h files to be included, or .lib (.a) to be added, it worked just magically well (with some limitations). I've moved to C/C++ later simply because, well it's a stupid reason. I was writing a "File Manager" like app for DOS (just single column, not like Norton Commander, FAR or Midnight Commander), and the only function in Turbo Pascal 5.0 to move files was just renaming a file in the same folder... Had I known about inline assembly and be more brave, I would've stayed in Pascal Land (And I was already familiar with Ralph Brown's Interrupt List)... But hey, this stupid reason moved me to C/C++ as the builtin function there did it... then again, soon after that I've started using more and more inline assembly. I love C/C++ now (especially C), and where I used to be really good at Pascal, I might have some hurdles reading pascal code today. Delphi was my last stop, and while I like it, I switched to video game development, and Pascal was not much used there (... Age Of Wonders I believe was written in some form of Pascal and possibly some other games,... Also part of Xoreax's IncrediBuild might've been, especially the part that does the C/C++ header processing, I think it was since we had issues with it, and while debugging found something pascal-ish in there, but don't remember now).

swombat 9y ago

I learned to program with Turbo Pascal on my PC back in the early 90s. Language lite is fun. And yet, when I clicked on this part of me was really just hoping this was referring to nvidia's Pascal architecture, a hint that maybe they were finally dropping the Radeon line and getting some decent video cards into their machines. One can but dream I guess.

jenkstom 9y ago

Pascal was one of my favorite languages (in the form of Object Pascal). I made a living from it for decades. But Borland and a long succession of companies killed it through mismanagement. It does still exist in the form of freepascal and lazarus, but I've moved on to c#. Pascal was great for people who didn't have curly braces in their muscle memory. But I suppose I've gone fully over to the dark side now.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

A lot of us seem to miss Pascal. Makes me wonder if it'll ever have a resurgence.

jonjacky 9y ago

The UCSD Pascal system, which ran on Apple II and many other computers in the late 70s - early 80s, always displayed a menu (for whatever program was running) across the top line of the screen. I wonder if that was the inspiration for the Macintosh menu bar.

fogus 9y ago

For those of you still interested in this story, the author of the original memo David Craig commented with clarifications, corrections, and further information. It's a truly epic comment. http://blog.fogus.me/2017/07/20/pascal-at-apple/#comment-808933 http://blog.fogus.me/2017/07/20/pascal-at-apple/#comment-808...