
Great Australian Software Developers: Nick Gammon and G-Pascal - bootload
http://supercoders.com.au/blog/nickgammongpascal.shtml
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pascalmemories
This is another of those amazing examples of how the super-cramped (by today's
standards) hardware of the late 70's and early 80's inspired some amazing
efficiency and brilliant programming. Machines with 1,2,4, 8 or super-enormous
16k memories were standard but still managed to be turned into efficient
workhorses for all sorts of uses (pleasure and business).

It's fantastic that many of these stories (and the source code) are starting
to be told. I love them for both the memories and finding out how things came
about and sometimes even seeing what they caused to evolve through till now.

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srpeck
Love it.

"The Commodore 64 version had extra features to support the hardware on that
PC. In particular, I added stuff to let you handle sprites, the colour screen,
and the sound chip. This extra stuff took about another 4 Kb, so I think the
whole G-Pascal took up 16 Kb."

kOS is my hope for a smaller and more efficient future:
[http://kparc.com/o.htm](http://kparc.com/o.htm)

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andrewstuart
It's interesting I think Nick Gammon wrote this about the same time as Anders
Hejlsberg wrote Turbo Pascal. In an alternate reality who knows how far
G-Pascal might have gone.

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bootload
Great write-up Andrew.

Having G-Pascal being developed locally would have been interesting, another
example of software companies starting in Melbourne, just like Beam. Turbo
Pascal was the second compiler [0] I used at uni. The stand out feature of TP
was the tight integration of editor to compiler and debugger. It just made
things faster to code than punching cards or remembering Edlin commands over
VT100.

[0] First, FORTRAN.

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andrewstuart
Yes it was a very interesting read but Nick wrote it, I just top and tailed
it.

