[HN Gopher] GPascal - A Blast from the Past (2011)
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       GPascal - A Blast from the Past (2011)
        
       Author : archargelod
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2025-03-20 02:25 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.gammon.com.au)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.gammon.com.au)
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | Ha ha I wrote that. Many years ago.
       | 
       | Though really it's just Nick Gammon answering questions so
       | actually he wrote it.
       | 
       | GPascal is an amazing feat of programming and if Nick had been
       | more commercially driven it might have been the basis of a big
       | company.
        
         | jgord wrote:
         | fantastic contribution .. I wish I had known about GPascal back
         | then !
         | 
         | As a kid with my dads 8088 .. I tried GW-Basic but ugh.. then
         | found a free Assembler A86 on a BBS and a book on writing TSRs.
         | 
         | Then the heavens opened and I got a copy of Turbo Pascal which
         | to me was, and still is, the peak of elegant engineering.
         | 
         | I tortured myself with Herb Schilds books and moved to C/C++ ..
         | but learned a lot.. still remember the buzz when I grokked the
         | idea of how a recursive descent compiler worked.
         | 
         | Kudos for writing all this up.
        
           | stevekemp wrote:
           | A86 was the assembler I used too, with a well-thumbed set
           | Ralph Browns interrupt list printouts.
           | 
           | It's kinda fun to go back to writing code in assembly for
           | CP/M systems nowadays, even simpler than MS-DOS due to a
           | smaller set of system APIs.
        
       | kristianp wrote:
       | Here's the article they refer to:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20110810083119/http://www.superc...
       | 
       | It was originally marketed for the Aplle II in Australia, then
       | ported to the Commodore 64
        
         | jgord wrote:
         | 16K .. wow
         | 
         | Great read, important history.. HACF / Gary Kildall pioneering
         | stuff.
        
       | WillAdams wrote:
       | One of my big regrets in life is that I was unaware of the patch
       | which would have allowed me to transfer the TRS-80 Pascal I had
       | on a cassette tape to a disk to run it under TRS-DOS....
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | For a similar achievement, check T3X. It runs under DOS, CP/M,
       | and Unix. https://www.t3x.org/t3x/ The author ported a version of
       | "Ladder" with it.
        
       | rluoy wrote:
       | Read an article about Anders Hejlsberg when I was in high school.
       | I was amazed by the story of him writing Turbo Pascal in
       | assembly.
        
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