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A ProgrammingLanguage by Nicolas [Wirth]. Once very popular in schools before students started whining they wanted to learn [C]. !!! A Sample ''(I'm off finding one right now.)'' !!! History Pascal became popular very quickly because the original compiler[3] was designed to be very easy to [port]. It was written in Pascal and compiled to ByteCodes, called ''P-Code''. All anyone had to do to get a Pascal compiler working on a new machine was to write a simple P-Code VirtualMachine for it -- they could hack the compiler around to general proper MachineCode later. This meant that Pascal spread very quickly through the world's Universities. They began teaching in Pascal, because it was a very good langauge to demonstate StructuredProgramming in -- a topic that was in vogue at the time[1]. Standard Pascal was nice language with terrible limitations: Pascal programs could not open files by name and could barely handle strings. BrianKernighan famously described Pascal's problems in [Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language |http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html][2]. These limitations mean that Pascal immediately splintered into dialects as people hacked in these missing features in incompatible ways. [C] did not have this problem, so it gradually took over from the Pascal dialects. !!! Implementations The most successful Pascal dialect has been Borland's TurboPascal. Further extended with [Modula2]-like modules and [C++]-like [OOP] it became [Delphi], which exists on [Linux] nowadays under the name [Kylix]. The two OpenSorce Pascal compilers for [Linux] are: [GNU Pascal | http://www.gnu-pascal.de/] and [Free Pascal | http://www.freepascal.org/]. Free Pascal tend more towards TurboPascal compatability. ---- [1] it hasn't gone away: programmers just take it for granted that code should be structured now. [2] Take this with a little grain of salt: Nicolas [Wirth] had already addressed most of Pascal's problems in his next langauge [Modula2] ''before'' BrianKernighan wrote this paper, and in some places BrianKernighan seems to be just complaining that Pascal is not [C]. [3] The online book [Pascal Implementation: A Book and Sources | http://www.cwi.nl/~steven/pascal/] walks you through the source code to this compiler. It's educational to read just as an extended critique of a non-trivial program.
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