Comment by anta40
2 months ago
Pascal.
Sure these days not many folks write OS kernel in Pascal, but there are some, e.g: https://github.com/torokernel/torokernel
I once want to try Forth (perhaps there's a Unix clone in Forth?), but seems like most folks using it are embedded/hardware devs.
I had read somewhere that some of the early Apple (not Mac) software, i.e., systems, application or both, was written in some Pascal variant.
https://folklore.org/Hungarian.html:
“The Macintosh used the same Motorola 68000 microprocessor as its predecessor, the Lisa, and we wanted to leverage as much code written for Lisa as we could. But most of the Lisa code was written in the Pascal programming language. Since the Macintosh had much tighter memory constraints, we needed to write most of our system-oriented code in the most efficient way possible, using the native language of the processor, 68000 assembly language. Even so, we could still use Lisa code by hand translating the Pascal into assembly language.”
MacOS was clearly Pascal-oriented, with its ‘Str255’, ‘Str63’, etc. data types.
Pascal interfaces and direct 68k ASM for the first years of Macintosh. C language bindings were third party and discouraged by Apple. There were good reasons for that in those days IMHO, since C came with a lot of Unix software libraries and people would demand that the science libs run. Apple said "no" but third parties built the compilers anyway. Many developers were attracted to Michael Kahl's brilliant ThinkC system, later to MetroWerks. MPW built a more *nix-like environment eventually, also.
source: C language developers for the Macintosh OS
ha ha, nice.
even early Windows versions were somewhat Pascal-oriented, with things like "long far pascal" used in C function declarations, to indicate the calling convention being used, whether right to left, or left to right, iirc.