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Mailing lists / fpc-other / 2016-06

Re: Quick Modern Object Pascal Introduction, for Programmers

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Luca Olivetti

El 20/06/16 a les 11:44, Mark Morgan Lloyd ha escrit:

A private online service I use has somebody who still bears the scars of Olivetti attempting to write an operating system in (strict, unexpanded) Pascal.

Oh, the memories (and, no, I'm not related). My first job was in one of Olivetti's factories where they used such a system for production control (they ate their own dog food).
I was programming the PLC (well, part of it) and it had to keep in memory two hours worth of planning since that was the time the computer needed to reboot when it crashed ;-)

I doubt it was plain pascal though: according to this page

http://www.storiaolivetti.it/percorso.asp?idPercorso=564

it was concurrent pascal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Pascal

(even if I'm not sure the wikipedia page refers to the same thing).

Bye

Luca

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Mark Morgan Lloyd
to Luca Olivetti
Luca Olivetti wrote 22 lines
El 20/06/16 a les 11:44, Mark Morgan Lloyd ha escrit: > A private online service I use has somebody who still bears the scars of > Olivetti attempting to write an operating system in (strict, unexpanded) > Pascal. Oh, the memories (and, no, I'm not related). My first job was in one of Olivetti's factories where they used such a system for production control (they ate their own dog food). I was programming the PLC (well, part of it) and it had to keep in memory two hours worth of planning since that was the time the computer needed to reboot when it crashed ;-) I doubt it was plain pascal though: according to this page http://www.storiaolivetti.it/percorso.asp?idPercorso=564 it was concurrent pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Pascal (even if I'm not sure the wikipedia page refers to the same thing).

I think he said it was mid-70s, but I got the impression that it was very much ISO-standard Pascal and it didn't have facilities such as assembler interfacing. On the other hand I think Concurrent Pascal was one of Brinch Hansen's earlier attempts, and like Pascal itself it might have taken a couple of iterations to get right.

The bottom line was that it was an unmitigated disaster :-)

Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]

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brian
to Mark Morgan Lloyd
Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote 31 lines
Luca Olivetti wrote: > El 20/06/16 a les 11:44, Mark Morgan Lloyd ha escrit: > >> A private online service I use has somebody who still bears the scars of >> Olivetti attempting to write an operating system in (strict, unexpanded) >> Pascal. > > Oh, the memories (and, no, I'm not related). My first job was in one of > Olivetti's factories where they used such a system for production > control (they ate their own dog food). > I was programming the PLC (well, part of it) and it had to keep in > memory two hours worth of planning since that was the time the computer > needed to reboot when it crashed ;-) > > I doubt it was plain pascal though: according to this page > > http://www.storiaolivetti.it/percorso.asp?idPercorso=564 > > it was concurrent pascal > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Pascal > > (even if I'm not sure the wikipedia page refers to the same thing). I think he said it was mid-70s, but I got the impression that it was very much ISO-standard Pascal and it didn't have facilities such as assembler interfacing. On the other hand I think Concurrent Pascal was one of Brinch Hansen's earlier attempts, and like Pascal itself it might have taken a couple of iterations to get right. The bottom line was that it was an unmitigated disaster :-)

There was more than one dog's breakfast of a Pascal compiler around in those days, My own favourite candidate was Whitesmith's Pascal for the PDP-11. Debugging had to be done in octal from Macro-11 listings, and Whitesmith's produced some memorably large and inefficient code. I have vague memories (35 years later!) of successive increment and decrement instructions *on the same register*. When you're trying to shoehorn everything into 32KB, albeit with overlays, that sort of thing MATTERS. :(

It was only after monitoring the compilation process via RMD and then doing a bit of RTFM that we realised what was happening - Whitesmith's Pascal, at least of that era, was a translator rather than a compiler. It was translating the Pascal code to C and then invoking Whitesmith's C compiler.

We played with it for a few days, then moved on to Oregon (OMSI) Pascal and never went back. I believe OMSI eventually became the basis of RSX-Pascal, which didn't exist at the point we were looking at compilers.

Brian.

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Paul Breneman
brian wrote 55 lines
On Mon, 20 Jun 2016 18:53:12 +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote: > Luca Olivetti wrote: >> El 20/06/16 a les 11:44, Mark Morgan Lloyd ha escrit: >> >>> A private online service I use has somebody who still bears the scars of >>> Olivetti attempting to write an operating system in (strict, unexpanded) >>> Pascal. >> >> Oh, the memories (and, no, I'm not related). My first job was in one of >> Olivetti's factories where they used such a system for production >> control (they ate their own dog food). >> I was programming the PLC (well, part of it) and it had to keep in >> memory two hours worth of planning since that was the time the computer >> needed to reboot when it crashed ;-) >> >> I doubt it was plain pascal though: according to this page >> >> http://www.storiaolivetti.it/percorso.asp?idPercorso=564 >> >> it was concurrent pascal >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Pascal >> >> (even if I'm not sure the wikipedia page refers to the same thing). > > I think he said it was mid-70s, but I got the impression that it was > very much ISO-standard Pascal and it didn't have facilities such as > assembler interfacing. On the other hand I think Concurrent Pascal was > one of Brinch Hansen's earlier attempts, and like Pascal itself it might > have taken a couple of iterations to get right. > > The bottom line was that it was an unmitigated disaster :-) There was more than one dog's breakfast of a Pascal compiler around in those days, My own favourite candidate was Whitesmith's Pascal for the PDP-11. Debugging had to be done in octal from Macro-11 listings, and Whitesmith's produced some memorably large and inefficient code. I have vague memories (35 years later!) of successive increment and decrement instructions *on the same register*. When you're trying to shoehorn everything into 32KB, albeit with overlays, that sort of thing MATTERS. :( It was only after monitoring the compilation process via RMD and then doing a bit of RTFM that we realised what was happening - Whitesmith's Pascal, at least of that era, was a translator rather than a compiler. It was translating the Pascal code to C and then invoking Whitesmith's C compiler. We played with it for a few days, then moved on to Oregon (OMSI) Pascal and never went back. I believe OMSI eventually became the basis of RSX-Pascal, which didn't exist at the point we were looking at compilers. Brian.

Speaking of PDP-11, I did assembler on it for 14 years then ported the entire thing to Turbo Pascal (thankfully *no* octal any more): http://brenemanlabs.com/MachOne5.htm
For real-time video machine control in the PC folks before me had to use complex intelligent serial port cards. But the 16550 UARTS had come out and I used them as the video tape machine commands all fit in the 16 byte FIFO. So I had 50,000 lines of all pascal code (no assembler) with a third of it running 30 times a second (frame rate) in an interrupt routine with no interrupts on 16 serial ports.

Some PDP-11s are still being used:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/

Regards,
Paul
www.ControlPascal.com

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brian
to Paul Breneman

On Tue, 21 Jun 2016 19:36:19 -0500, Paul wrote:

<...>

Show quoted text 14 lines
Speaking of PDP-11, I did assembler on it for 14 years then ported the entire thing to Turbo Pascal (thankfully *no* octal any more): http://brenemanlabs.com/MachOne5.htm For real-time video machine control in the PC folks before me had to use complex intelligent serial port cards. But the 16550 UARTS had come out and I used them as the video tape machine commands all fit in the 16 byte FIFO. So I had 50,000 lines of all pascal code (no assembler) with a third of it running 30 times a second (frame rate) in an interrupt routine with no interrupts on 16 serial ports. Some PDP-11s are still being used: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/nuke_plants_to_keep_pdp11_until_2050/

Wow! If it weren't for the fact I've retired, my resume would be in the mail. Debugging with assembler listings and ODT used to be interesting work! A little slow, maybe, but hey, you can't have everything... :)

Brian.

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