Feelin' My Age (part 3): UCSD P-System Pascal

 From the mid 1980s to early 90s I was proud to be a mature undergraduate student of the UK's remarkable Open University†, majoring in pure Maths.

I took a subsidiary computer science module as part of of the degree. Pascal was one of the languages that was taught (Prolog being another). At the time they taught Pascal using the P-system and UCSD Pascal.

UCSD Pascal in use - source Wikipedia, Public Domain

UCSD Pascal Handbook - source http://www.kdbarto.org/UCSD_Pascal.html

So why does that make me feel my age? Well the Wikipedia Pascal Programming page discusses UCSD Pascal under the "Early Pascal Compilers" section! And the last release was in the mid eighties.

Now I did pass that course (with distinction I might add!) and I'd love to show you some of the code I wrote, but sadly it's on 5.25" floppies! Strangely enough, I don't have a suitable drive handy.

Which brings me on to another reason this makes me feel all dinosaur-like. To take the course I needed to get my hands on an IBM PC XT clone with CGA graphics, all of 512KB of RAM and a pair of 5.25" floppy drives. No hard drive in mine - too expensive! Such beasts were the current PCs at the time.

Image displayed in CGA 160×100 16 color mode(4-bit) - source Wikipedia, Public Domain.

BTW, I resented buying that hateful piece of crap. I was happily using an upgraded Sinclair QL at the time (as was Linus Torvalds, apparently), and I thought, and still think, it was superior to that PC. Multitasking vs TSRs? SuperBASIC vs MS Basic? I know which I'd take. But more on that in another post.

Those were the days. Someone please bring me my pipe and slippers.

Trivia corner: What does the "P" in P-System mean

Many people, myself included until today, believe that the "P" stands for "Pascal", because the P-System is so closely associated with UCSD Pascal.

But, apparently, the P System is an implementation of a p code [virtual] machine where the "p" stands for "portable".

Beg to differ? That's what the comments are for.

† The OU was set up to allow UK citizens to take a degree while living a normal life: working, bringing up kids etc. Like other UK universities at that time, the honours degree was the equivalent of four years full time, but OU students are permitted to spread the time out to suit their home circumstances. I had very poor health at the time, so this was a perfect arrangement for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are very welcome, but please don't comment here if:

1) You have a query about, or a bug report for, one of my programs or libraries. Most of my posts contain a link to the relevant repository where there will be an issue tracker you can use.

2) You have a query about any 3rd party programs I feature, please address them to the program's developer(s) - there will be a link in the post.

3) You're one of the tiny, tiny minority who are aggressive or abusive - in the bin you go!

Thanks

Popular posts from this blog

New String Property Editor Planned For RAD Studio 12 Yukon 🤞

Image
This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release. It seems I'm getting very excited about multi-line strings of late. My previous post was about multi-line string literals for Delphi  and this time I'm talking about the new multi-line string property editor being slated for the RAD Studio 12 IDE. For more years than I care to remember, I've been frustrated by the inability to enter multi-line strings in the Delphi IDE object inspector. That meant having to resort to code to initialise some multi-line labels. So frustrated was I that I wrote a little property editor of my own ( stringpe ), way back in 2004. It's still around and on GitHub. Here's what it (sometimes) looks like: Yeah, I know this is Vista - I used an old screenshot Sometimes? Well it looked like that until it got installed on DPI aware Delphis, and then it sh
Read more

Multi-line String Literals Planned For Delphi 12 Yukon🤞

This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release. The upcoming new release of RAD Studio 12 Yukon is a major update that's got a new Delphi language features that I've been wanting for years, or perhaps even decades since I first discovered heredocs in PHP. Yep, we're going to get multi-line string literals. This excites me just as much as the earlier introduction of inline var statements, which was a lot! I write a lot of multiline string constants in my code like this: const   S0 = ' Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.' +         sLineBreak  +        '   Vestibulum eleifend elit id dapibus pulvinar.' +        sLineBreak +        'Suspendisse tincidunt, diam vel dapibus aliquam.'; Miss out one of the closing quotes or + signs and bang, compile failure. Annoying. But now we have multi-l
Read more

Call JavaScript in a TWebBrowser and get a result back

Calling a JavaScript function in a TWebBrowser is easy, but getting a return value from it is hard. I've been struggling for ages to find an answer to this, and lots of users have asked. My article " How to call JavaScript functions in a TWebBrowser from Delphi " goes into details. Christian Sciberras suggested a solution that depended on modifying the HTML source to include a hidden input field and modifying the function stores its result in the field. I've wanted a tidier solution that didn't involve changing either the HTML code or the JavaScript function, because we can't always do that. I've now got a solution based on Christian's: Create a hidden input field in the current document with a unique id. Wrap the required function call in JavaScript that calls the function and stores its return value in the input field. Read the value from the input field and return it. It's a bit of a dirty hack, and it only works if the function&#
Read more