Comment by amichail
4 hours ago
Do you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
4 hours ago
Do you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
Pascal is a lot broader language and won't fit in sub 16KB of ROM (even if you exclude monitor [call-151])
A subset of it?
I have a copy of "Tiny" Pascal by Supersoft from 1979 on a cassette tape which was licensed to Tandy Corp and which would load onto a 16KB TRS-80 Model III and allow a bit of room for programming.
One of the great regrets of my life is that when I was doing so and when it would have mattered, I was unaware of the patch for this which would have allowed it to be saved as an executable to a TRS-DOS disk....
Maybe they could have implemented a useful subset of Pascal.
Atari 8-bits had a cut-down version of ALGOL called Action! which is now open source: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/217770-action-source-code/...
They didn't invent the language. BASIC was already a popular language for beginners on microcomputers at that time.
Microsoft itself popularized BASIC on microcomputers with its 8080 BASIC, starting on the Altair and ported to everything with A, B, C, D, E, H, and L registers since.
Before then, however, BASIC was already popular on minicomputers as both an introductory language for beginners and a business language; the various "Business BASIC" dialects providing a small-business alternative to COBOL on mainframes with their features for decimal math and ISAM database access.
Except that wasn't possible. Languages like BASIC and Forth exist because they were the only kind of language implementable in 4K with no disk. Pascal in its smallest form (UCSD p-system) still needed disk overlays. The smallest C compilers were poly phase, needing storage for intermediate state.