In further honor of Niklaus Wirth and Pascal: In a Poly-88 system I acquired last year, it had a printing of the Tiny Pascal Compiler article in a 1978 BYTE publication. That has BASIC source code for the initial interpreter of a Pascal compiler. We ported that over to the Commodore BASIC V2, as used on the Commander X16 system. As-is it only supported the INTEGER type (and arrays thereof). It compiles to a "p-code" where then an interpreter executes those results. The thing about the X16 system is we have BASLOAD that adds a few features to BASIC: long variable names, and symbolic GOTO/GOSUB so that line numbers aren't needed (effectively a kind of QuickBASIC front end to the native BASIC of the host system). It works splendidly at making it far easier to write up more complex BASIC programs.
With the original TinyPascal baseline all working, now Martin Schmalenbach is taking the initiative of expanding the type support (including pointer support) and has a working "Version 1" that handles some simple input and output. We realize use of BASIC and p-code was never the most efficient approach to building a robust compiler and development environment. But we still consider it fun to use modern tools and perspective and pulling further on the threads of that 1978 article and see where it goes. It may be a helpful tutorial on the process of using one language to create another, then using that result to develop the language you really wanted (e.g. using tinyPascal to later write an on-system C compiler). Or it may be an example of a "super sized" BASIC program doing an interesting application (and exercising the multiple banks of the X16 system). Original discussion thread: https://cx16forum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6833 V1 introductory thread: https://cx16forum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6947 -Steve On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 10:08 PM Paul Berger via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > Pascal did not have strings originally, but it is a common > "enhancement". I recall 40 years ago setting out to write a program to > create a data file using the S/370 ANSI Pascal compiler and it did not > have strings. > > Paul. > > On 2024-01-04 8:51 p.m., Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote: > > Pascal has strings. > > > > Sellam > > > > On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 4:19 PM Warner Losh via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> > > wrote: > > > >> My first two pascal programs of any size were an Alarm Clock for my DEC > >> Rainbow and a PDP-11 simulator, also for my DEC Rainbow (I did a science > >> fair project comparing stack machines to traditional ones, but invented > my > >> own stack machine and was too young to know the right way to > >> compare/contrast the two different machines, so I scraped by with a > better > >> than average rating... mostly because nobody knew how to evaluate it, > but > >> that was to my advantage thinking back on it...). Ah, fond memories of > >> Turbo Pascal. > >> > >> Lack of strings, and lack of a good way to do portable I/O doomed the > >> language. > >> > >> Warner > >> >
