Pascal user manual and report
by Kathleen Jensen, Niklaus Wirth, K. Jensen, Andrew B. Mickel, James F. Miner · first published 1974
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I learned Pascal by reading an equivalent book ... Jensen and Wirth, Pascal User Manual and Report. Springer. Silver cover. Typeset in typewriter font. Syntax presented both in BNF and graphic 'railroad track' diagrams. Very short, even though it was two books in one: the tutorial User Manual and…
on “Ask HN: What was programming like before internet?” ↗…http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burrough... IBM 1401 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1401.html P&V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming) PASCAL – User Manual and Report http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Pasc... The UNIX Time-Sharing System https://archive.org/download/bstj57-6-1905/bstj57-6-1905.pdf A Trip Down The Graphics Pipeline: The Homogeneous…
on “Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)” ↗> parse and evaluate infix notation expressions Wirth's "Pascal User Manual and Report" has a listing of a program on pg 75 that does just that. Except it emits the expressions in postfix form rather than evaluating them. It's 31 lines of code, including declarations and `end` statements.…
on “My worst tech interview experience” ↗…language in non-standard ways, including various schemes for storing string length in front of the string. But nothing like this was ever part of the ISO Pascal standard, and it was certainly not in the "PASCAL User Manual and Report" by Kathleen Jensen and Niklaus Wirth. In fact, in standard Pascal, string handling is extremely rudimentary; there was no way to express "this variable / parameter / pointer refers to a string with…
on “Show HN: A nice C string API” ↗"Lisp Lore: A Guide to Programming the Lisp Machine" by Bromley&Lamson was also written using Concordia AFAIK. The Symbolics documentation also has Jensen&Wirth "Pascal User Manual and Report" and Harbison & Steele, C: A Reference Manual.
on “CLOS: Integrating Object-Oriented and Functional Programming (2004) [pdf]” ↗…of the great example code which I busily translated to C. If you think K&R is too hard for beginners consider how many programmers learned programming from the badly-typeset and somewhat inscrutable "Pascal User Manual and Report" (1974). That was the programming 101 text used at the local university when I was there.
on “Learn C The Hard Way” ↗…given to the extent of research on other variants of Pascal outside of the original Pascal of 1973, and references to documents such as "An Assessment of the Programming Language Pascal" of 1975, and "Pascal User Manual and Report" of 1978. Those documents were ISO/IEEE related, to help promote an ISO standard of Pascal, versus businesses using Pascal in the commercial space like Apple and DEC (later Compaq) were doing (both major…
on “Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?” ↗…taught "practical lisp" in the 90s, SICP was frustrating because of its insistence on describing idiomatic Lisp in text, but with far fewer examples than comparative texts in other languages (k&r c or PASCAL User Manual and Report.) There seems to be a tradition of this in Scheme and CL books. Where you could easily find books in the 80s entitled "$ {N} PROGRAMS IN BASIC" or some such, which were useful to provide a corpus of…
on “Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?” ↗…disappeared and I was far more productive. (I know C compilers always have numerous extensions, most of them of dubious value, but still, plain C remains a far, far more useful language than the Pascal of "Pascal User Manual and Report". Which is why C buried Pascal.)
on “Niklaus Wirth, or the Importance of Being Simple” ↗Pascal also has had numerous extensions. No one used Pascal of "Pascal User Manual and Report" from 1976. Strangley compiler extentions are only cool when talking about C, in fact, most C developers have no idea what ISO C is actually all about.
on “Niklaus Wirth, or the Importance of Being Simple” ↗…the bitter end with Delphi and C++ Builder. I don't know which of them, C++ or Pascal/Delphi, but Delphi was certainly popular enough at its heyday. Obviously, Object Pascal was a very far cry from the Pascal User Manual and Report, and even at its extended version it was strictly less powerful than C++, so your point still stands. But it was more beginner-friendly. In my opinion, the moment you got beyond the basics (no pun intended),…
on “Niklaus Wirth, or the Importance of Being Simple” ↗