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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 th

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.
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  C was also designed to compile in one pass, hence the need for forward references. The preprocessor was extra overhead, though. Also, from my recollection, Turbo Pascal was not just faster than C compilers. It was also faster than other Pascal compilers. And pretty much any other computer regardless of language. That was part of its appeal.
  - adrianmonk 9y ago
    Correction (in a comment since I'm past the editing time window): "pretty much any other compiler".
rsfinn 9y ago
My first job out of college was porting the interpreter from Macintosh Pascal (the predecessor to Lightspeed/THINK Pascal, sold by Apple) from the Macintosh back to the Apple II (as "Apple II Instant Pascal", also sold by Apple). Boy, was that fun. Had to tuck the interpreter into a 4K "fold" of the Apple II memory map -- a block of address space that was normally mapped to ROM could be switched to point to the corresponding RAM in the language card that would otherwise be inaccessible. [Edit: to be clear, neither of these were the UCSD Pascal referenced in the original article; I had that on my Apple II in college, and demoed a baseball statistics program I wrote in it to the THINK people as part of my job interview.]
StillBored 9y ago
ORCA/C was available since the mid/late 1980's (IIRC). It is still being sold too https://store.syndicomm.com/syn/complete-c-bundle/ https://store.syndicomm.com/syn/complete-c-bundle/. They also had a pascal. Granted it was targeted to the IIGS rather than the straight II line, but given my personal experiences running apple pascal on a machine with only a single floppy drive it was just as well. In a way Jobs was right, BASIC+assembly were a better target for the 8 bit apple II than pcode and the long development turnaround time for pascal. Worse the resulting applications were slow, not just running but the extra delay loading the pascal system from 5.25" disk rarely made for a good user experience. That said, to this day, I compare all new languages I learn to object pascal/delphi, and frankly I have yet to find one that seems as polished, productive, well documented, resistant to bugs, etc.
u801e 9y ago
> When I went to college in 1986, Pascal was the primary language used in all entry-level courses at Virginia Tech. When did Virginia Tech switch from Pascal to C++? I did my undergrad there in CS between 2002 and 2006 and the introduction courses were in C++ by then (though I believe they now have switched to Java and Python). The only exposure I had to Pascal was implementing a compiler for an undergraduate and graduate level course for a subset of the language's features.

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.

adrianmonk 9y ago
C was also designed to compile in one pass, hence the need for forward references. The preprocessor was extra overhead, though. Also, from my recollection, Turbo Pascal was not just faster than C compilers. It was also faster than other Pascal compilers. And pretty much any other computer regardless of language. That was part of its appeal.
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  Correction (in a comment since I'm past the editing time window): "pretty much any other compiler".

rsfinn 9y ago

My first job out of college was porting the interpreter from Macintosh Pascal (the predecessor to Lightspeed/THINK Pascal, sold by Apple) from the Macintosh back to the Apple II (as "Apple II Instant Pascal", also sold by Apple). Boy, was that fun. Had to tuck the interpreter into a 4K "fold" of the Apple II memory map -- a block of address space that was normally mapped to ROM could be switched to point to the corresponding RAM in the language card that would otherwise be inaccessible. [Edit: to be clear, neither of these were the UCSD Pascal referenced in the original article; I had that on my Apple II in college, and demoed a baseball statistics program I wrote in it to the THINK people as part of my job interview.]

StillBored 9y ago

ORCA/C was available since the mid/late 1980's (IIRC). It is still being sold too https://store.syndicomm.com/syn/complete-c-bundle/ https://store.syndicomm.com/syn/complete-c-bundle/. They also had a pascal. Granted it was targeted to the IIGS rather than the straight II line, but given my personal experiences running apple pascal on a machine with only a single floppy drive it was just as well. In a way Jobs was right, BASIC+assembly were a better target for the 8 bit apple II than pcode and the long development turnaround time for pascal. Worse the resulting applications were slow, not just running but the extra delay loading the pascal system from 5.25" disk rarely made for a good user experience. That said, to this day, I compare all new languages I learn to object pascal/delphi, and frankly I have yet to find one that seems as polished, productive, well documented, resistant to bugs, etc.

u801e 9y ago

> When I went to college in 1986, Pascal was the primary language used in all entry-level courses at Virginia Tech. When did Virginia Tech switch from Pascal to C++? I did my undergrad there in CS between 2002 and 2006 and the introduction courses were in C++ by then (though I believe they now have switched to Java and Python). The only exposure I had to Pascal was implementing a compiler for an undergraduate and graduate level course for a subset of the language's features.