GPascal – A Blast from the Past (2011)

gammon.com.au

52 points·archargelod··8 comments

Ha ha I wrote that. Many years ago.

Though really it’s just Nick Gammon answering questions so actually he wrote it.

GPascal is an amazing feat of programming and if Nick had been more commercially driven it might have been the basis of a big company.

fantastic contribution .. I wish I had known about GPascal back then !

As a kid with my dads 8088 .. I tried GW-Basic but ugh.. then found a free Assembler A86 on a BBS and a book on writing TSRs.

Then the heavens opened and I got a copy of Turbo Pascal which to me was, and still is, the peak of elegant engineering.

I tortured myself with Herb Schilds books and moved to C/C++ .. but learned a lot.. still remember the buzz when I grokked the idea of how a recursive descent compiler worked.

Kudos for writing all this up.

A86 was the assembler I used too, with a well-thumbed set Ralph Browns interrupt list printouts.

It's kinda fun to go back to writing code in assembly for CP/M systems nowadays, even simpler than MS-DOS due to a smaller set of system APIs.

For a similar achievement, check T3X. It runs under DOS, CP/M, and Unix. https://www.t3x.org/t3x/ The author ported a version of "Ladder" with it.

One of my big regrets in life is that I was unaware of the patch which would have allowed me to transfer the TRS-80 Pascal I had on a cassette tape to a disk to run it under TRS-DOS....

Here's the article they refer to: https://web.archive.org/web/20110810083119/http://www.superc...

It was originally marketed for the Aplle II in Australia, then ported to the Commodore 64

16K .. wow

Great read, important history.. HACF / Gary Kildall pioneering stuff.

Read an article about Anders Hejlsberg when I was in high school. I was amazed by the story of him writing Turbo Pascal in assembly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com