What Pascal compiler did Apple use to build all that?
Looks like Turbo/Borland Pascal but I'm not sure that it existed in that time or/and was ported to 6502.
Looks like Turbo/Borland Pascal but I'm not sure that it existed in that time or/and was ported to 6502.
Apple’s Lisa Pascal developments began from scratch for Apple when it licensed in 1981 a Motorola 68000 native code Pascal compiler from Silicon Valley Software in California. This compiler was based upon the older P4 compiler from Niklaus Wirth of ETH in Switzerland and consisted of two general passes. Pass 1 produced I-Code, a low-level representation of the high-level Pascal constructs. Pass 2, the code generator, converted the I-Codes to optimized 68000 object code. Apple even considered early in the Lisa’s development using a custom Apple processor which would execute P-Code directly, but the expense of developing such a chip was too much for Apple’s accountants and this project was dropped.
Turbo Pascal came much later, and Borland would adopt UCSD units in Turbo Pascal 4, and Apple's Object Pascal on Turbo Pascal 5.5, then its OOP capabilities grew from there based on what was happening on C++, influenced by Borland's work on their C++ compilers.
Apple Lisa Pascal (started back in 1979) and Clascal (early 1980s extension of Lisa Pascal) were well known projects of Apple. The evolution went from Lisa Pascal, to Clascal, and then Object Pascal. Of course back in the 1980s, information doesn't get around as fast as it does now. Also, Apple played games with naming, which creates confusion that what is used was Pascal. You will see Apple Lisa or just Lisa a lot, omitting the Pascal name/description, so people can get the impression its some entirely different language.
When those employed by AT&T started pushing attacks on Pascal in the early 1980s and disparaging the language, to push their investments in C and Unix, Lisa Pascal and Clascal were arguably overlooked. Though this is partially also because of how Apple promoted it.
Unfortunately, that bad habit continued with Borland/Embarcadero, where people don't know that Delphi is a dialect of Object Pascal. In the same way people didn't know that Apple Lisa and Clascal were dialects of Pascal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal#Clascal_and_Appl... (Clascal and Apple's early Object Pascal).
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/apple/lisa/... (An Introduction to Clascal).
Turbo Pascal didn't exist yet. The leading Pascal of the early-1980s era was UCSD Pascal [1] but it used a cross-platform bytecode approach which wasn't very fast and wouldn't have been suitable for the Lisa.
I suspect Apple built their own 68k Pascal compiler? But I'm sure someone on HN knows the actual facts.