Multilevel standards

[rudell at ucbcad.UUCP]

> Ah John, perhaps you should have a short talk with the folks over at Apollo.
> They built an entire os, a transparent shared file system, network and
> graphics system using Pascal. It has dynamic runtime binding (unlike unix)
> and shared runtime libraries (unlike unix).
> The system is not shabby - it's real fast AND supports C.
> 
> Not bad for a "toy language". 
> 
> (personally, I would have done the work in C, but it shows that that vehicle
>  is not the only concideration, the destination is...)
> 
> -- 
> 
> J Bradford Parker


Wait one minute.  You can hardly call what Apollo used standard
Pascal.  It is a language which will run on no other machine.  They
essentially added many C-like constructs (free pointers, a notion of
modularity (they even call them static and extern!) to the syntax of
Pascal.  The argument was that Standard Pascal is a toy language.
Apollo Pascal is a real language, but unfortunately, no one but Apollo
uses it.

Sure, a "standard" Pascal program will get close to running on the Apollo
(assuming you never try to open a file given a specific filename, or
binary search an enumerated-type :-)