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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

You would buy, or rent from the local library, a book for ZX Spectrum and type that Pascal compiler source code in.

https://worldofspectrum.net/pub/sinclair/books-pics/p/Pascal...

That never happened. At least, not in my circles. The progression was typically Basic of some variety (whatever your system shipped with), peek & poke, machine code, assembler and later on either C or Turbo pascal assuming enough time had passed.

Pascal on 8 bit was just too damn slow compared to the alternatives to be very useful and compile times were horrendous. Even the university students that had access to Pascal compilers for the most part only used them to turn in their assignments and avoided it for everything else.

I did a little contest with a friend: we both wrote a chess program, he wrote his state of the art with a ton of optimizations in Pascal, I wrote mine in assembler. His program never stood a chance against a very simplistic implementation that only had minimax and a greedy (strictly material based) evaluation routine.

Good times :)

I'm currently running CP/M, on a Z80 single-board computer with 64k RAM.

Compiling a simple snake, or tetris game, takes about two seconds. CP/M with turbo pascal is pretty fast.

I started my journey with ZX Spectrum BASIC, then z80 assembly, before jumping to MS-DOS and x86 assembly. Learning C, and other languages, didn't start until my 16-bit days.

(Though I have a memory of receiving a FORTH system for the ZX Spectrum I don't think I did anything useful with it, or fully understood it given that I was about 15 at the time.)

Very nice, what are you running, one of Ciarcia's boards or something else entirely? And what do you use for mass storage?

When I was in 8 bit territory the best I could get was 360K floppies and running any kind of serious compiler required multiple floppy swaps to get the passes in. 6809 with 64K RAM was the best 8 bit system that I had, the next best was a BBC Model B with a very much maxed out Solidisk (more than maxed out, we ran more banks than were officially supported).

A random board I came across by accident - low production run, but decent despite that.

The board uses an USB-stick for storage, formatted as a FAT filesystem which makes exchanging files between this and another system easy - though of course you can transfer files over the serial port.

The biggest issue is that the board has only 62k of RAM so I'm stuck with CP/M 2.2, rather than 3.0 which requires paging-support. Still I can run infocom games, BASIC, Turbo Pascal, and other retro things.

I'd love to know more about your board, it sounds like a very interesting one. Is it in S100 bus format or something bespoke?

Something bespoke.

My code repository contains a link to a youtube channel where the board was discussed, and where I found it randomly. But sadly the upstream site of the provider and the (useful) forums it hosted are gone unless you use the wayback machine:

https://github.com/skx/z80-playground-cpm-fat

As an alternative - Agon Light 2 (eZ80 CPU). By default it comes with BBC BASIC modified to take advantage of 24 bits addressing, but it can run CP/M if you want. The nice thing about Agon is that it can run standalone if you add to it a keyboard and a VGA display.

I had a TRS-80 color computer that had BASIC built in and the first alternative language I got was a “editor/assembler” ROM cartridge.

By the mid 1980s they came out with an operating system called OS-9 which was a multitasking OS inspired by UNIX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

You could get a few languages for that, including a C compiler. A lot of people were using C on CP/M so I would type in programs from Byte magazine. I wrote a FORTH (in assembly language) for OS-9 that was subroutine threaded and unusually had a C like API to access files instead of the block based I/O most FORTHs had.

By the late 1980s I had a 80286 machine and wrote a lot of Assembly, C and Turbo Pascal. I thought Turbo Pascal was better than C but switched to C when I got to college because it was portable to the Sun workstations they had. By the time I got to grad school I got a 486 and switched to Linux.

Personally I liked 8086 assembly a lot and even though the segmentation scheme it used could be awkward I thought it was fun to code.

I chose C (Turbo-C) because it was much better at strings than Pascal: specifically it had strdup() and their length was not limited to 255 characters. Also C had escape sequences- actually Turbo Pascal had them, not sure about standard Pascal.

I think earlier versions of Pascal had only fixed length space padded strings.

Yeah, 6809 and 8088 (arguably an 8-bit CPU) supported C just fine. The other 8-bits, not so much. I wish the CoCo had been a better computer than it was (crappy keyboard, not a real serial port, terrible video). My Atari 800XL was better except for its CPU.

Strings with maximum length are a bummer but null terminated strings have their own problems and are part of the whole "unsafe at any speed" nature of C.

The thing about the CoCo was that Radio Shack sold an absurd number of peripherals for it.

I got a "multi-pak" which would let me plug in four devices to the cartridge slot and I had a real UART for it. The built-in sound was awful but you could get an Orchestra-90, a speech synthesizer cartridge, etc. Most of the hardware and software at the time supported hardware flow control which made the bit-banger serial report more reliable than you might think at low speeds.

The video was a real problem, I think a lot of software didn't get ported to the Coco because everybody thought 40 column text was bad enough, who wants to deal with 32? For instance I never saw the Infocom games being available for the Coco although I found out just recently that Infocam had made a Z-Machine interpreter for it. Eventually they came out with a Coco 3 that had 80 column text and high resolution modes with a lot of colors but it was getting late at that point.

We (my friend and myself who had identical machines) managed to squeeze 64x32 (256x192, so the font (4x6!) wasn't exactly spectacular but it worked well enough for real use) out of the 'high res' monochrome graphics mode (PMODE 4) and that really made life easier.

The fixed string were a thing in ISO Pascal, most dialects had better string support, and even ISO Extended Pascal ended up improving them, although by then no one cared.

There was a UK clone of the CoCo that had a half decent keyboard, the Dragon 32 (actually: it had 64K if you tickled it just so).

Writing complicated software in assembly is a pain. The famous "Wizardry" (one of the earliest CRPGs released in 1981 for the Apple ][ and eventually ported to other systems) was written in Pascal. Making all the code to support the various character classes, weapons, monsters, etc. was far easier in a reasonable structured language rather than either Basic or assembly.

Hm. I actually found assembly to be quite manageable. It required a lot of discipline but then again, that goes for most programming languages. The bigger problem is the use of local variables and parameters in assembly isn't exactly a 'free abstraction', but once you have a mechanism for that (relatively easy to set up using macros) it all becomes much more manageable (but then you're 20% on the road to writing a C compiler...).

I remember more than once disassembling pieces of C code and loudly complaining about the poor quality of it while hand optimising it by deleting about half the instructions even after I got my Amiga. On the C64 the notion of C or Pascal didn't cross my mind - a few BASIC compilers were somewhat moderately popular.

E.g. Oasis Software had White Lightning FORTH ad Basic Lightning[1] and a few others. I never tried the FORTH version, but Basic Lighting and the successor Laser Basic and Laser Basic Compiler started with a bunch of BASIC extensions and eventually added compilation on top of that. The extensions did things like install raster interrupts to virtually increase the number of sprites and provide sound routines, as well as add pre-emptive multitasking(!) on the C64. If I remember correctly, 3-5 BASIC tasks + sprite animations could run concurrently - I don't recall seeing much point, because around then I started with assembler and cycle-counting raster interrupts was suddenly where it was at.

I vividly remember the demo programs the screenshots on the page linked below are from, though...

Who'd want Pascal when you had stuff like that, though? My introduction to Pascal came on my dads boring and slow ITT XT PC, mostly out of curiosity as to how anyone could use a machine that was so obviously inferior to my Amiga - monochrome, no bitmap graphics, no proper sound, less memory (I had a 512KB expansion, for a full megabyte)... Of course it had a harddrive, but it also costs 3 times as much... But I did end up experimenting with Turbo Pascal and some dBase for a while.

[1] https://www.jimbrooks.org/archive/programming/forth/WhiteLig...

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