Great Australian Software Developers: Nick Gammon and G-Pascal | Hacker News Reader

Great Australian Software Developers: Nick Gammon and G-Pascal

supercoders.com.au

25 pointsbootload6 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Seems to my like G-Pascal is more comparable to UCSD-Pascal, which also targets a VM. Turbo Pascal produced native binary code.

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