Pascal News

.. rr ...... :j..... .. [.~ U.niVsrEity ~UOTE Q(rERENCE NUMBER
[. ~l , • ,. Df torontD
. _.. J _,I
[ iO . :(-:;~.'C_._ ~ '1'
_,nL~[llJ
cDmputing services
Hemenway Assoolates.
\01 Tremont Street,
Bos to·n HA 0 ~1'08
U.S.A.
As a longtime user of the language Pascal I was
interested to see a description at' your lan.guage
HA-PASCAL/I. As. 1 read the description, however, I beca ue
concerned, and finally skeptical. While you have produced
what will c'leal'll' be a good product and a very useful tool
for the intended applications, I am concerned that you are
selling a product as a Pascal language that is really not
Pascal. (Pascal is not an acronym but a person's name, so
it Is usually written in normal case, like Ford Hotors,
Washington or San Diego.)
It seems to me - after reading just your advertising
flyer that your product HA-PASCAL/I is more accurately
described as PL/I with some of the syntar of Pascal. Your
memory references HEM and HEMW in particular use the concept
of a ·pseudo-variable" which is normal to PL/I but
completely alien to Pascal. All Pascals that I know of use
(built-in or library) FUNCTIONs and PROCEDUREs for this
purpose - a FUNCTION to return a va'lue; a PROCEDURE to send
one. This 1s the- spirit of Pascal; "'pseudo--variables" are'
n-ot.. A19,0, your CALL statement for externa,l routines is­
PL/l, not Pascal. All Pascals that I have used or seen
declare external routines as a FUNCTION or PROCEDURE, as
appropriate, with the subprogram body replaced by the
keyword EXTERNAL (or EXTERN in a few cases).
P e'rh aps more import anti y, your advert 1 sin·g makes no
reference to' the existence of the RECORD construct. The
RECORD concept 1s one of the key concepts of Pascal; one of
the things that makes Pascal Pascal. A Pascal without
RECORDs is like a computer without a CP'U. like a car wlthout
w-hef!'l5 •
(4161978-4462
Page 2
Finally, your statement that the inaccessability to machine
langaage In some Pascals (most provIde it either Inllne or
via EXTERNAL routines) prevents "the Pascal user from
e ffecti veil' programming his microprocessor- leads me to
believe that you are equating machine programmIng with
effective program.mlng. I think if you consider the
programmer's time in coding and debugging, you will find
Pascal even a p-code implementation - to be the more
"effective" •
I am bringing these problems to your attention to help
prevent a situation in wbich people using your product think
they are using Pascal, and try to move programs to a Pascal
compiler and blame Pascal for not being yaup language. To
be honest with your customers current and potential, )'OU
might choose to refer to HA-PASCAL/I as "a Pascal derivative
for microcomputer systems programming" which it is
rather than ". version of Pascal" - which I don't think it
is.
Thank you.
Ian F. Darwin
University of Toronto Computing Services
10 King's College Road
Toronto, Ontario M5S lAl
Imaklet/tik
CC:
T. Wood
Pascal User Group Newsletter
'Ok
N
N
...
• 'Ok
N
""