
Tiny Pascal (2017) - ingve
http://www.trs-80.org/tiny-pascal/
======
WalterBright
I remember when the source code for this was published in BYTE magazine. I
figured out every line of it, and I thought how it worked was utterly magical.
It was a big factor in me going into compilers.

~~~
avmich
[http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/how-i-came-
to...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/how-i-came-to-
write-d/240165322)

Thank you, Walter. I guess this link about Tiny Pascal was posted after that
story?

~~~
WalterBright
I did not submit that link. It may or may not be a coincidence.

~~~
Shivetya
OT: Empire was one of the games that hooked into computing and eventual
programming. For such a simple looking game it was to me then what
Civilization games are to people today, something I would start playing and
look up and see it was morning

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RodgerTheGreat
I didn't see a link anywhere to the source material, so here's the manual for
TRS-80 Tiny Pascal:

[https://archive.org/details/Tiny_Pascal_1982_Tandy](https://archive.org/details/Tiny_Pascal_1982_Tandy)

Page 17 includes some example programs, and the syntax of the language is
described on a set of railroad diagrams starting on page 20.

------
vanderZwan
> _This version of Tiny Pascal was written in North Star BASIC. According to
> the articles, it implemented most of Pascal with some limitations:_

> _\- the GOTO statement was missing_

> _\- only integers and one-dimensional integer arrays were allowed for
> variable types_

> _\- there was no “structured data type, pointer type, user defined type, and
> file type”_

> _\- parameters were passed by value only_

> _On the other hand, Tiny Pascal did add some extensions to standard Pascal,
> such as else clauses in case statements._

I would imagine this to severely hamper creating efficient programs in the
language, especially in those resource-limited days. What kind of programs
were written in Tiny Pascal?

~~~
narag
I had never heard of this implementation.

The feature set doesn't seem so crazy for those days.

It's trivial to implement two dimensional arrays. And you can pass indexes as
parameters.

I remember programming with Spectrum and the first PCs and sometimes you
needed to look up some table for the ordinal of a character or sprite. I
remember poking bytes in the 8086 screen buffer, was it B800?

~~~
vanderZwan
It's more the lack of structs and pointers, and mandatory pass-by-value that
makes me wonder

~~~
narag
People wrote huge programs with Spectrum assembler so go figure.

~~~
Gibbon1
Wordperfect was written in assembly.

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FullyFunctional
Funny I hadn't heard of this before, but I grew up with BLS Pascal (which is
small but very capable). Wirth's most recent iteration on the theme is Oberon
[1] and the compiler is quite small and digestible (one file for each the
lexer, parser, and codegen respectably). With a less verbose syntax, this
could be a nice language :)

[1] www.projectoberon.com

------
codewritinfool
I used to own this package.

