Thread by @fogus

Today's reading.
archive.org/details/Apple_…

I'm not familiar with the author David T. Craig. Any further information on his other works is appreciated.

This is going to be fun.

While BASIC was certainly available, it's unclear how much it was actually used for system-level development.

So the question arises... why Pascal? It's difficult for me to get a sense for the state of languages at the time.

That said, in 1978 other viable languages were in use: C, Pascal, PL/M, CLU, Smalltalk, Lisp, and Forth.

At the time anything was possible and no one knew that C would one day dominate the world. In that light, Pascal seems a reasonable choice.

Pascal has a nice mix of low and high-level concerns with reasonable safety features. Plus compilers were relatively simple and extensible.

BTW: Atkinson was responsible for Quickdraw and the Lisa+Mac UIs. He also created MacPaint and Hypercard. Quite a resume I'd say.

Raskin was impressive in his own right. A PC-appliance visionary, he helped design the Mac and his baby the Canon Cat.

In addition to writing stellar tech manuals, Raskin also wrote a great design-minded book "The Humane Interface" --> amazon.com/Humane-Interfa…

UCSD Pascal (at the time) was a complete OS+programming suite. The programs ran in a p-code VM. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pasc…

It was based on Wirth's P2 compiler developed in 1974. sourceforge.net/projects/pasca…

I try but fail to imagine what it means to just up and start an "internal dev group." Was it a club? A formal branch? Brown-bags? WHAT?!

I don't know what "a powerful filer" is.

I wonder if Apple or UCSD wrote the 6502-based p-code interpreter. Anyone know?

Chalk up yet another language for Atkinson... I can't find anything about his explicit link to the turtle graphics package sadly.

You can see a later version of the former at

This is a systems-programmers dream scenario!

SOS seems pretty sweet! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_SOS

Though it seemed that /// Pascal was the end of VMs for Apple (at the time) UCSD Pascal was influential to a later language called Java.

It's hard to know for sure, but Lisa's system must've been one of the largest Pascal codebases at the time.

Apple liked Pascal so much that they started their Lisa toolchain from scratch!

In college, I remember an assignment to create a 1-pass Pascal compiler. converting code to "quadruples" [op tgt op1 op2]. That was fun.

Pascal was a great compiler learning language because the language was such that you could do a lot with it with very few passes!

I wonder how far along that p-code processor got inside of Apple?

This was Atkinson's work. I never did any QuickDraw programming and I feel like I missed out. :(

What's unclear to me is if programmers needed to have a Lisa to program for the Mac? Or was the toolkit available on the Mac directly?

These names pop up often, but I can't find much on either of them.

Clascal! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal

Sad.

This seems to imply that development for the Mac was a pain for 1-2 years after its release.

I'm tickled by the idea that there was both Apple COBOL and Apple Fortran. I wonder what PasMat and PasRef did?

That's all I need... more retro programming books.

The end is nigh.

But hell... what a way to go!

"This is our new consultant... Mr. Wirth. He knows a little about Pascal."

Done.

There's a crap-ton more on UCSD/Apple Pascal at archive.org/details/apple_…