I worked with PASCAL/VS in the late 80s and early 90s and
used it a lot to do technical computations for the Stuttgart local transport
company. I built interfaces to SQL/DS (DB2 for VM in todays speak),
DMS/PANEL and GDDM - all things that were not available from IBM
in those days - and GKS (graphic kernel system), which is a device
independent library to produce graphical output for plotters as well as
for graphical displays.
This was one of the best compilers I ever worked with. I never had the
feeling to miss anything in the compiler or in the language definition.
Today I am trying to add some - more - extensions to the old Stanford
Pascal
compiler of 1982 (running on VM/370 R6 on Hercules) with the final
target to
make this compiler as useful as PASCAL/VS was (and maybe porting
it to more recent OSes). But this will be a long effort, because I don't
have
much spare time.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 01.10.2013 21:31, schrieb Anne & Lynn Wheeler:
jwgli...@gmail.com (John Gilmore) writes:
What I think of Pascal and our disagreement are not themselves
important; but such differences strongly suggest that discussions of
the relative merits of different statement-level procedural languages
is an all but futile undertaking unless the context in which they are
to take place is specified in advance and in great, irksome detail.
the IBM mainframe pascal was originally done by the IBM Los Gatos VLSI
tools group. They had been doing a lot of language work with Metaware's
TWS ... TWS reference
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#71 What terminology reflects the "first"
computer language ?
other past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004q.html#35 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005e.html#1 [Lit.] Buffer overruns
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#6 About TLB in lower-level caches
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006e.html#12 About TLB in lower-level caches
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#14 Newbie question on table design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#58 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2008j.html#77 CLIs and GUIs
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009l.html#36 Old-school programming techniques you
probably don't miss
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2009o.html#11 Microprocessors with Definable
MIcrocode
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010n.html#54 PL/I vs. Pascal
It was used for a lot of VLSI tools before being released as product to
customers. It was then also used implementing the ibm mainframe tcp/ip
support ... I've periodically commented that it had none of the buffer
overrun and other exploits that have been epidemic in C-language based
implementations. some past posts about C-language vulnerabilities and
exploits
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subintegrity.html#overflow
there was other throughput issues with the mainframe tcp/ip (got
44kbytes/sec using 3090 processor) ... but I did the changes for
rfc1044 support and in some tuning tests at cray research got
sustained channel speed between 4341 and cray ... using only modest
amount of 4341 processor (possibly 500 times improvement in bytes
moved per instruction executed). misc. past post mentioning 1044
support
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#1044
for the fun of it I did a rewrite in pascal of a major portion of the
VM370 kernel (done in assembler) ... and demonstrated it running
(faster) in virtual address space interacting with a smaller vm370
kernel. part of the issue was that mainframe PLI came with really
heavyweight library environment ... while Pascal could run in
effectively as an independent "embedded" environment. Note that this
wasn't directly a fault of PLI language ... since MIT Project MAC used
PLI language to implement the Multics operating system.
http://www.multicians.org/multics.html
the mainframe product pascal was ported to the rs/6000 ... and
typically same pascal programs that ran on mainframe ran also on
rs/6000.
after IBM went into the red in the early 90s, IBM was cutting back all
over the place ... it transitioned to using a lot more off-the-shelf
industry VLSI design tools ... transition included transfering a lot of
internal tools to outside vendors. As part of one transfer, I got tasked
to port one 50,000+ statement vs/pascal VLSI layout program to other
vendor platforms. This was somewhat tramatic since 1) pascals on these
platforms appeared like they had never been used for much more than
univ. student instruction and 2) in one major case, the pascal support
had been outsourced to an organization 12 time zones away (I could drop
in the computer vendor hdqtrs location ... but still had to wait for
minimum 1 day turn around).
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