Re: Pascal has always been great
Oregon Software Pascal (also known as OMSI Pascal) was not that popular. I thought we were one of less than a handful of UK customers.
We used it for teaching purposes on RSX-11m at Newcastle Polytechnic, and we had the academics writing everything from a student support software suite (which the academic used as his BCS Part 2 qualification work) through linear algebra and realtime control programs (RSX-11M was a real, realtime operating system, and the PDP-11 was great at interrupt processing).
We managed to link to the NAG libraries, a GKS subsystem, and pretty much all of the RSX-11m included libraries, although Files-11 was a bit of a challenge. The secret to traditional data processing in standard ISO Pascal was the Variant record, which enabled you to do fairly sophisticated file I/O even though the standard I/O looked a bit limiting. The one thing Standard Pascal could not do was file I/O with variable record sizes, though. The biggest problem was the 16 bit program address space for the 11/34 we were using, so unless you were prepared to use overlays (I never did get the hand of OVL syntax for overlays), linking large libraries seriously reduced the size of the programs you could write.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
