cak (07/22/82)
The current issue of Min-Micro Systems (July 1982) has an article (p. 73) about a system called Sol, which is being built in France. It's a Unix-like system built on ISO Pascal; they like Pascal. The article claims that the kernel and utilities have been rewritten in Pascal, and will be packaged in something similar to what Western Electric is offering, but meeting the needs of French users. Pascal is the standard teaching language within France. The target machines are Honeywell Level 6, Intel 8086 and Motorola 68K and 6809. pdp-11 may come later, as will National 16000, Z8000 and Hewlett Packard machines. They are two years into the four year project, and have got cores of the ISO language on the Level 6, 8086, 68K and 16000. Currently they are in the process of integrating the Pascal kernel and utilities into Unix. They expect Pascal Unix to be operational by year-end. A discussion of Pascal vs. C ensues -- you can read it for yourself. It's all the same old stuff. Sol should be almost free to research institutes, and should "compare favorably" with the prices from Western. The work is apparently being done by industrial organizations, rather than universities. Does anyone have any more detailed info than that presented in this article? Has anyone seen one of these systems? Perhaps our new European Usenet members can shed some more light on the matter? Chris Kent, Purdue CS