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Pas6502 – Object Pascal dialect compiler to 6502 (bitbucket.org/paul_nicholls)
66 points by pjmlp on April 1, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments





Nice - I know languages such as C/C++ also get compiled into Assembly language code and hence are also used for computer hardware programming. Is Pascal used in that space in the industry?


Yes, for example https://www.mikroe.com/ sells C, Basic and Pascal compilers for different kinds of micro-controllers.

Although the market isn't as big as the usual C and C++ shops, Mikroe has enough customers to have been in business since 1995.


I know it's not industry, but as an aside, Oberon (an OO successor to Pascal also designed by Wirth and his team) was used to write BlueBottle OS at ETH Zurich. All of userspace and most of the kernel was written in Oberon.

I've played around with BlueBottle inside Qemu. One interesting feature is that userspace programs are compiled to compressed syntax trees and JIT-compiled by the dynamic linker/loader at runtime. The very slow disk drives used by the ETH Zurich workstations, combined with the relatively little amount of optimization performed by Wirth-style compilers, meant that the savings in disk I/O time was greater than the cost of JITting, so it was a net performance win. One of Wirth's graduate students went on to develop this idea further by developing SafeTSA, a similar idea, but pushing more of the work into the ahead-of-time compiler by switching from compressed syntax trees to compressed static-single-assignment control flow graphs.


Small correction, BlueBottle uses Active Oberon, not plain Oberon.


One possible syntax for PLCs looks a lot like Pascal[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_text


I develop 8 and 16 bit embedded systems in C but I still have a fondness for Pascal and still think it is an ideal language for embedded systems as it would catch a lot of the static type errors that get through my C Compiler and cause me no end of grief.

I guess that's why the bigger push for Rust or ADA which provide similar safety nets.

Its good people still support it, I don't think it is going away despite nay-Sayers.


It definitely used to be used for that purpose more but has been largely replaced.

That being said, Ada does get some use and has strong roots in Pascal.




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