[fpc-other] Pascal and GCC: ancient history

[Ralf Quint]

On 8/1/2014 3:50 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> I'm not sure to what extent this is common knowledge, but while 
> looking around for something else I came across 
> http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1.html which includes quotes from 
> Richard Stallman about how he started off with a Pascal compiler from 
> Lawrence Livermore Lab when writing GCC. This is possibly the most 
> interesting bit:
>
> "I didn't really know much about optimizing compilers at the time, 
> because I'd never worked on one. But I got my hands on a compiler, 
> that I was told at the time was free. It was a compiler called PASTEL, 
> which the authors say means ``off-color PASCAL''.
>
> "Pastel was a very complicated language including features such as 
> parametrized types and explicit type parameters and many complicated 
> things. The compiler was of course written in this language, and had 
> many complicated features to optimize the use of these things. For 
> example: the type ``string'' in that language was a parameterized 
> type; you could say ``string(n)'' if you wanted a string of a 
> particular length; you could also just say ``string'', and the 
> parameter would be determined from the context. Now, strings are very 
> important, and it is necessary for a lot of constructs that use them 
> to run fast, and this means that they had to have a lot of features to 
> detect such things as: when the declared length of a string is an 
> argument that is known to be constant throughout the function, to save 
> to save the value and optimize the code they're going to produce, many 
> complicated things. But I did get to see in this compiler how to do 
> automatic register allocation, and some ideas about how to handle 
> different sorts of machines."
>
And then went on to write the abomination called EMACS...



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