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[rbowman]

On Mon, 02 Jan 2023 13:59:03 -0800 (PST), Grant Edwards wrote:


> Yonks ago (early 80s), I used Pascal to write an RTOS kernel and call
> processing firmware for a cell-site radio running a 16-bit
> microprocessor (Z8000). It worked great. However, that Pascal compiler
> had a few extensions designed specifically to support embedded systems
> use on bare metal -- things like specific length signed/unsigned
> interger types (with binary operations), pointers to raw memory and
> configurable bounds-checking.

Around that time I had a source of income from writing extensions. My 
client tended to hire engineers fro the University of Maine where Pascal 
was the didactic language. Wirth's Pascal was characterized as a language 
very good at telling secrets to itself. Controlling robotic arms, 
gathering information from process controllers, and so forth wasn't on the 
menu. 

As for Turbo Pascal, I had been using the BDS C subset on a CP/M system. I 
installed TP, did the requisite hello world, and I thought something was 
broken. I had to convince myself the compiler had spit out an executable 
that fast and hadn't crashed.