Acorn Pascal Compiler

Someone on Acorn programmer is asking about a 32bit version of Cambridge Pascal Compiler.
(don’t think the source is available)

Are there any here – that would be interested in 32bitting Acorns version of Pascal?
Looks like it’s written in ‘C’

The first hurdle is getting hold of the sources… without that everything else is academic.
It would be nice to have a Pascal option just to round out the available languages.

Would it be possible to do a GCC Pascal?

Would it be possible to do a GCC Pascal?

It looks like GNU Pascal (aka GPC), that was previously available in an old GCC version on RISC OS (I think it was 2.95) is officially dead – last update was 2006.

Free Pascal http://www.freepascal.org/ seems to be still alive. Maybe worth a port. It has an ARM backend (as well as AArch64) and has been ported to many platforms.

I only dimly remember “Acorn Pascal”, but it was very much plain old ISO Pascal, which is not a very good general purpose programming language. Most people associate “Pascal” to “Turbo Pascal” aka Delphi. Free Pascal seems to be largely compatible with these better known Pascal dialects.

Of course, what you really want is an up-to-date GNAT port, as Ada is the one and only sensible Pascal-like programming language :-)

TurboPascal was basically plain Pascal with some useful options to remove the stick wedged up Pascal’s posterior. I found Delphi to be “pascal like” in much the same way that VB.Net resembles VB – “sort of maybe”.

The ISO Pascal compiler was written in Pascal, with 6502 run-time. I did unreleased ports of it to 65816 (for the Communicator) and ARM sometime in ‘86 but thankfully don’t have the sources anymore. It was time to move on from ISO Pascal a long time ago…Wirth did.

TurboPascal was basically plain Pascal with some useful options to remove the stick wedged up Pascal’s posterior.

Even the first serious version of Turbo Pascal, version 3 which was available for CP/M, was a very much extended version of Pascal. Saying it was “basically plain pascal” just shows that you never seriously compared both variants. The whole extended runtime system, string handling, extension units etc. made it a comparatively nice language.

I found Delphi to be “pascal like” in much the same way that VB.Net resembles VB – “sort of maybe”.

Delphi is Object Pascal with a powerful standard library. Language wise, it is similar to Turbo Pascal 7. Of course, Delphi has been vastly expanded in the last 20 years since the last version of Turbo Pascal.

Pascal was only ever conceived as a teaching language. In its purest form, it isn’t possible to do anything with it. All products out there are superset dialects of the original language.

Saying it was “basically plain pascal” just shows that you never seriously compared both variants.

We were taught ISO Pascal in college, and tried out our code on Turbo Pascal 5. I was never entirely sure if pure Pascal was just naff, or if this was “stuff to be taught later on”.
I pretty much stopped caring when I moved to C…

made it a comparatively nice language.

Yes, TP was quite pleasant to work with. Having some experience of how it behaved made understanding TurboC easier.

Delphi is Object Pascal with a powerful standard library.

Ah, objects. They were just starting to arrive in the TP5.x era. Like with VB and C++, I basically just ignored the entire OO movement. Probably mentally broken from too many years with BBC BASIC. ;-) That said, I believe OO is now old hat and some new fangled DevOps Agile nonsense has come along. Yawn.

Of course, what you really want is an up-to-date GNAT port, as Ada is the one and only sensible Pascal-like programming language :-)

Extending on that, I found a nice article by David Given about Ada and why it is so great: http://cowlark.com/2014-04-27-ada/index.html

German speaking users can read my thoughts about it: http://itblog.huber-net.de/2016/10/die-guten-erinnerungen-an-ada/

All that reinforces my wish for an up-to-date GNAT port. I really have to look into that.

I did not loved business programming in ADA, but quite like ADA itself :)
Clean. Simple.

This one?

Or just get it from this APDL mirror.

I did try the original ftp://ftp.uni-stutgart.de/ site, it is offline. I still have it in my FTPc site list.

There is a public mirror for the old ftp-uni-stuttgart.de site, see https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/15913

With plain old FTP access, so also accessible from equally old machines with classic software.