Pascal at Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: Pascal at Apple

#21

Post by FRex » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:07 AM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal Compiler are available if you really want to play with Pascal. It's super easy and fun to do simple GUI programming in it especially.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#22

Post by yuhong » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #10

I joined Apple in 1987, about the time they started ditching Pascal in favor of C. C++ (in the form of CFront) was just starting to be a thing. Apple's Pascal had been extended to the point where there were few true differences between it and C, other than - strings with busted semantics (size being part of the type being a huge mistake, leading to a proliferation of types like Str255, Str32, Str31, Str64, etc). I sh…

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/srd/2017/07/20/englishma...

I found out that GetString converts a Pascal string to C without a length argument!

Re: Pascal at Apple

#23

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:26 AM UTC

jzelinskie wrote: post #8

I've been reading a lot about Niklaus Wirth recently. I read an interesting piece about Oberon I found in an HN archive[0] that mentions Oberon usage on Macs. I'm very tempted to buy "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" after reading a few things about him. I wish there were more instances of "computing in a vacuum" like at ETH. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486

Iirc Wirth compiler source is online. It's a "single page app" though... Be warned.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#24

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:28 AM UTC

sand500 wrote: post #12

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

How does Pascal compare to python for absolute begginers?

[deleted]

Re: Pascal at Apple

#25

Post by shakna » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:28 AM UTC

sand500 wrote: post #12

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

How does Pascal compare to python for absolute begginers?

Harder in some ways, because types matter a lot more, private methods and less namespacing.

But the IDE makes GUI programming ridiculously easy, something Python can't compare on.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#26

Post by juliangamble » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

thought_alarm wrote: post #17

I'm reminded of a really great interview with Bill Atkinson where he describes (among many other things) how he initially brought Pascal to Apple and the Apple II. https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m The Pascal bits are from 45:00 to about 50:00. ... My manager at the time said, no, we don't want to do this [Pascal], people are happy with what they got. I overrode him and went to Jobs, and Jobs said "Well, I'm not con…

This is one of the great quotes in the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs book:

    Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level programming language. Jobs 
    had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, "Since 
    you're so passionate about it, I'll give you six days to prove me wrong." He did, and Jobs 
    respected him ever after.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&l...

Re: Pascal at Apple

#27

Post by tedajax » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:42 AM UTC

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

Intro to computer science freshman year of high school in 2004 was still using turbo pascal and it was great. Dropping into BGI graphics mode was a great beginner friendly way to draw shapes and make some cool things. It's what got me into game development in earnest. I wish I could get this same setup to teach people with but BGI doesn't work in later versions of Windows.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#28

Post by robterrell » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:43 AM UTC

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.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#29

Post by bdcravens » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:47 AM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #7

bdcravens wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know 10 years ago turning off Javascript was still a real concern. I tend to be of the mindset that in 2017 a browser without Javascript is like a browser without a mouse/trackpad - technically viable, but no one does it, so depending on Javascript is a given. Know of any good statistics on this however?

1.1% of people have it turned off in one measurement: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi... .

I wonder what percentage of that is actually poorly written scrapers/spiders.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#30

Post by rpeden » Sat, Jul 22, 2017, 2:52 AM UTC

robterrell wrote: post #28

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 Virgini…

Is Clascal the language you're thinking of?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal