Thinking about Wirth

"Frank Hamersley" <terabitemightbe_at_bigpond.com> wrote in message news:wGZ4g.19486$vy1.11903_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> Tony D wrote:
> > Ha ! I'll top that with a "Pascal Implementation: The P4 Compiler" two
> > (slim) volume set - one of the source code to the Pascal P4 compiler
> > and interpreter (written in Pascal, of course !) and the other a
> > discussion of that source.
> >
> > I'm sure I remember a professor explaining that Pascal's text file
> > handling was like *that* so that it was possible/easy to write Pascal
> > compilers in Pascal, and that the first compiler for the CDC was
> > compiled by printing out two sets of the source code, laying them on
> > the floor side by side and manually running one with the other as input
> > ....
>
> I am trying to imagine this! I used to know the entire CDC instruction
> set including addressing modes by sight (there weren't that many of
> either) and I thought they would have prolly written a small bootstrap
> compiler in Assembler or Fortran IV to get going.
>
> We did use Pascal first on a CDC Cyber 73 (FWICR) but by the time I got
> to the final undergrad year the prof had got Modula-II running on the
> PDP-11 (with cross compilation to the LSI-11) so our "Pascal" activities
> were curtailed.
>

The first Pascal I ran accross was on the VAX. I was migrating from the DECsystem-10, so I was in search of an easy language. I messed around with Pascal a little and decided that I really liked it. I especially liked the user manual written by Kathleen Jensen.

Then I got to attend a one week seminar for DEC employees, entitled "Pascal as aSecond Language", taught by Kathleen Jensen. It was excellent!

The down side of learning VAX Pascal is that I never did learn the VAX debugger, the way I knew the DEC-10 dbugger, DDT.

The second Pascal I ran across was Borland's Turbo Pascal. An outstanding buy, at the time (1983). Received on Sun Apr 30 2006 - 14:17:41 CEST