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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: 0s | 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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kjs3 ◴[04 Sep 25 22:53 UTC] No.45133166[source]▶
The OP says that 8-bit CPUs couldn't handle Pascal well

The 6502 might not have been able to handle Pascal well, but Borland Turbo Pascal for CP/M (z80, 8080, etc) worked very, very well. It was also released in 1983 or so, but dunno whether it or Factor was 'first'.

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guenthert ◴[05 Sep 25 14:06 UTC] No.45138768[source]▶
Yes, Turbo Pascal was awesome and quite possibly the best programming environment for the Z80. The register-starved 6502 however relies on zero-page addressing for efficient code, that's difficult to exploit in compilers for high level languages (and hence why you don't see that in general purpose CPUs anymore). One way around that is to compile to a byte code which is then interpreted (e.g. BCPL, UCSD Pascal).
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1. wduquette ◴[07 Sep 25 21:56 UTC] No.45162550[source]▶
And in fact I eventually went from Apple Pascal to Turbo Pascal on a Kaypro 4 running CP/M-80. It was like coming home.