[Info-vax] Pascal question

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/21/2019 8:51 PM, John Reagan wrote:
> I did add a bunch of things to Pascal before I took my 5 year
> assignment to NonStop.  Given the difficulty of updating the
> documents, all of the new features are in the release notes.  Anybody
> notice the new SELECT and SELECTONE statements (stolen from BLISS),
> the %IF conditional compilation, or all the 64-bit pointer support?
> 
> Given that I was a Pascal user before I joined Digital (I answered my
> own SPR when I started) and was on the Pascal committee, I have a
> strong connection with Pascal.  Don't tell my management but I do
> have a list of additional things I'm going to add to Pascal.  It
> needs 64-bit descriptor work and all the RTL data structures need to
> be 64-bit'ized.  We did that for our Tru64 product, but I wasn't able
> to make the change on Alpha or Itanium. I'll widen them all for x86.
> 
> I really want to improve the SDL Pascal backend to get a much better
> STARLET.PAS.  The current Pascal output was done back in the VAX days
> with only 32-bit INTEGERs.  Now that Pascal has lots of 64-bit
> pointer and 64-bit integer support, I can make it much better.
> However, there might be code that has used the traditional
> STARLET.PAS prototypes that might not like the "better" ones.
> However, I won't do the NEWSTARLET that the C headers did.

But some of that stuff may turn out to be a bit complicated
and require significant time.

I don't know how the source code for VMS Pascal looks
like. But I have this idea that adding predefined functions
would be relative simple.

Sort of perfect for training if you get a new compiler
person you need to train in how the Pascal frontend
is structured and how to do builds.

:-)

Arne