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#124 Pascal

Pascal In a Nutshell

Notes

I haven’t written or used any Pascal code for decades. But it was my first love when it comes to computer languages. It’s where I first learned structured and object-oriented programming techniques. I’m curious about the state of Pascal. Does anyone still use it much? CAN you even use it on modern machines?

Pascal:

  • was designed by Niklaus Wirth, first appeared around 1970
  • uses static, strong, safe typing
  • influenced by ALGOL W, Simula 67

It has existed under various standards and implementations:

  • Niklaus Wirth’s 1974 version of the language - the “standard”
  • ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal. First created in 1983, mainframe and minicomputer implementations generally followed the standard. PC versions did not!
  • ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal
  • Borland standards Turbo Pascal and Delphi
  • UCSD Pascal, later adopted as Apple Pascal

Installing a Compiler

First step is obviously just to try and get it installed…

Free Pascal appears to be one of the more actively maintained implementations. I’ve successfully got it running on MacOS - see here.

NB: GNU Pascal was a thing for a while, but the official release died around 2006, and Mac ports by Microbizz supports only up to Mac OSX 10.6.

Credits and References

About LCK#124 pascal
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LittleCodingKata is my collection of programming exercises, research and code toys broadly spanning things that relate to programming and software development (languages, frameworks and tools).

These range from the trivial to the complex and serious. Many are inspired by existing work and I'll note credits and references where applicable. The focus is quite scattered, as I variously work on things new and important in the moment, or go back to revisit things from the past.

This is primarily a personal collection for my own edification and learning, but anyone who stumbles by is welcome to borrow, steal or reference the work here. And if you spot errors or issues I'd really appreciate some feedback - create an issue, send me an email or even send a pull-request.

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