lauren@UCLA-Security@sri-unix (08/11/82)
From: lauren at UCLA-Security (Lauren Weinstein) Date: 27 July 1982 1635-PDT (Tuesday) You could certainly be sure that, as usual, they would *never* dream of doing it the same way as everyone else. The July issue of "Mini-Micro Systems" has a rather interesting article about the French efforts to implement a full Unix system, including all utilities, in Pascal instead of C. Versions for the Honeywell Level 6, 8086, 68000, 6809, and PDP-11's are expected. This system is being called "Sol" and is widely discussed (apparently) in the European Unix Users' Group meetings. I would be interested in learning more about the history of this project. There were some interesting quotes: "Problems that may arise with Pascal were detected by replacing chunks of C coding with parts written in Pascal..." "It is not obvious that C is better than Pascal in NS16000-based machines or Honeywell minicomputers... however... programmers used to C will not like Pascal, and vice versa." "Research institutes will get the Sol source code "almost free," as with Unix..." ----- I am not a big Pascal fan, and I must frankly admit that as far as I'm concerned, the whole idea seems counterproductive in terms of true system standardization is concerned. Still, I thought that I'd mention the project in this forum since it has not been noted previously in UNIX-WIZARDS to my knowledge. I wonder what sort of licensing/distribution agreement the Sol group is working with? It sure sounds like they started with Unix source code... --Lauren--
mark (08/11/82)
I think the French are using ISO Pascal, which has "conformant arrays". I'm not sure, but I believe you can make variable length character strings using conformant arrays, so the obvious problem is taken care of. However, they insist on using ISO Pascal, NOT a superset, since they are using existing compilers. This means they can't use ANY extensions. I would think they would at least want external compilation, since recompiling the whole kernel to make a 1 line change doesn't sound like much fun. And there appears to be no way to implement qsort(3). malloc should be interesting, too, but I can see writing that in assembly language (or C) and a user program using "new". It should be interesting to see what /usr/include becomes in Sol. Mark
dmh (08/13/82)
I am courious as to how i/o and device driver will be done. I love pascal! However, whenever device drivers are needed I always had troubles. Maybe it was the USCD version or Univac exec trouble. I agree with the quote "programmers used to C will not like Pascal, and vice versa." After a Year since my change I am still not overjoyed! Dave Hollander BTL HO