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Action was the best 8-bit programming language

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90 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 19:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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wduquette ◴[04 Sep 25 21:15 UTC] No.45132286[source]▶
The OP says that 8-bit CPUs couldn't handle Pascal well, and that Action! (release in 1983) was the first IDE for 8-bit machines.

But Apple Pascal was released for the Apple II in 1979. Based on UCSD Pascal, the Apple Pascal system was basically an OS that simply was an IDE; and it worked perfectly well on 8-bit hardware. I had quite a lot of fun with it back in the day.

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1. sema4hacker ◴[04 Sep 25 22:45 UTC] No.45133100[source]▶
Around 1979 or 1980 I was working for an 8080-based CRT terminal manufacturer and ported UCSD Pascal to our 8080 system, which worked flawlessly. I don't remember the details, but I believe all I had to do was implement a few BIOS-style routines. I got hung up for a few days because I had inited the heap pointer to a byte boundary instead of a word boundary, but after that everything booted and ran as advertised.