[fpc-pascal] TurboVision is reborn as FOSS (again)

[greim at schleibinger.com]

Travis, 


I was working with the Propeller1 for many years We realized a commercial project with it . See 
http://www.schleibinger.com/cmsimple/en/?Setting_and_Maturity:Ultrasonic_Setting_Measurement


It works very reliable. 


In June, I have got my first Propeller2 board from Parallax. 
Really an impressive chip. Getting all relevant info
and testing and evaluating all the different development platforms is still demanding. 
But situation is getting better each day. 


Pascal on the Propeller itself would be possible. There are CPM2.2 emulator for the Propeller around, so
TurboPascal 3.0 should work. But with all the CP/M and Z80 emulator overhead. 


As you may know, Niklaus Wirth developed Oberon as a successor of Pascal. 
Its near identical to Pascal, just yet another name. 


Its not only a compiler but also a development environment, including an editor and also an own OS and GUI ! 
He developed it with Gutknecht mainly at the Xerox PARC labs, long before Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made their own copies of the ALTO work-station. 


The required resources are minimal. In 2013 Wirth developed an own RISC processor on a FPGA
He published the Verilog and also the Oberon code, because Oberon is written in Oberon (!)
The whole compiler, editor, OS, GUI, screen driver, mouse control, etc has less then 10.000 lines of Oberon code !!!
That is near nothing, 
See
http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/
and
http://www.projectoberon.com/


I realized this project on a FPGA for myself as proof of concept. 
It worked finally, but handling the Xilinx development software was (and is still) a mess. 
Later I translated the according PC emulator of Peter de Wachter from C to FreePascal. 


The RISC-5 ** architecture of Wirth is quite simple and I would see
no real problem to adapt the Oberon system to the Propeller2. 


The 3 main obstacles: 


1. There is no divider in the COGs, but I guess its possible to use the CORDIC divider instead.


2. The RAM space of the Propeller2 is too small, OBERON requires 1 MByte of RAM mainly for the video buffer. 
The Propeller2 is supporting some RAM extension, so also this should work. 
As far as I can see know, this would be the only necessary hardware extension the the P2 evaluation board. 


3. RISC-5 has a floating point adder, multiplier and divider. So any emulator required. 


Porting the core compiler called OBERON-0 to the propeller would be the most complicated thing and 
OBERON-0 is using no floating point math. 
All other things should be easier, I guess. 
Finally we would get a 8 core OBERON computer....


Many Christmas dreams...


Regards
Markus


P.S. **) don't mix RISC-5 up with the now popular RISC-V architecture. Wirth is a genius, but has never
a lucky hand for finding good and unique names for his projects. So from 
Algol to Pascal to Modula to Oberon to Oberon-2 to A2 to Project Oberon...

--- original message ---
On December 23, 2020, 6:10 PM GMT+1 tsiegel at softcon.com wrote:





On 12/22/2020 11:43 AM, Markus Greim
via fpc-pascal wrote:


> Wow..



> Programming languages I worked with in the last 40 years: 


> 12. SPIN
> ....




When you say spin, I'm assuming you're talking about the parallax
propeller boards programming language. The propeller 2 is coming
out shortly (already out for early adopters), and I am anxiously
awaiting the day I can get my hands on one. I've built all kinds
of projects with the propeller 1 board, the first of which was an
FM radio.

But, to put this (somewhat) on topic, I've been wondering how
complicated it would be to port FPC to the propeller 2 board,
since they now have GCC ported, I would absolutely love to be able
to program the propeller boards in pascal. I do have a couple of
their java stamps, those are interesting, and they do have a micro
python that can be run on the propeller 2 boards, so adding pascal
should be doable, I'm just not sure how much work it would take,
but it would be nice to have another language to add to the mix.
--- end of original message ---
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