[fpc-pascal] Be careful of too many features

[Brian]

On 5/30/22 14:59, Steve Litt via fpc-pascal wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> In 1984 I started my programming career with Whitesmith Pascal,

Sorry for the off-topic post, folks, but this just opened a wound from 
my distant past... :(

I was a couple of years ahead of you, Steve, but at least in 1982 on 
the PDP-11, Whitesmith Pascal was a truly *awful* thing - a 
translation engine, not a compiler. It was a front end to Whitesmith 
C, which in turn translated to Macro-11 and then compiled and linked 
that (we watched these steps via RMD). The code produced was horribly 
inefficient (we looked at the Macro-11 listings), and using RSX-11M 
rather than M+, with no library space, code space was at a premium.

We quickly switched to Oregon Pascal (which DEC later bought as the 
foundation of RSX Pascal) and it was a *far* superior compiler. Apart 
from the debugger, that is, which took up so much space that you could 
just about debug 'Hello, world' and that was it.

Hopefully Whitesmiths improved in the couple of years before you 
started with it, or there was a better implementation if you used it 
on a machine other than a PDP-11.

Brian.