[TUHS] berkeley unix version hosting Doug Cooper's Standard Pascal Environment

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

When we taught CS40 in 1982 I want to say that it was still the first
edition of Oh Pascal (which I still content is the best introduction to
>>programing<< I know).  Mike and Doug did a super job with it.  In my
mind, the fact that they are using Pascal is secondary to their method of
how to think about and write real programs.


At that time our students were using the Cory Hall 11/70, which was V7+2BSD
and the Pascal implementation would have been close to what  is on the 2BSD
tape.  And yes, Kirk and Joy had been students of Sue Graham. IIRC Joy took
the original Ken Thompson code and extended it. Kirk retargeted it the vax.

By that time the Vaxes had taken over for the grad students, with Ernie
being the primary system running 4.1BSD.   4.1A,B,C are still a few years
away.    But the Berkeley Pascal system was in heavy development by Sue's
students.  There was probably a divergence of features from what was on
Cory and what was on Ernie from a Pascal standard.   For instance Mark
Linton was working on his thesis which became dbx and pdx (and was what the
Gnu folks started with for the later gdb).

Also remember the original book and  compilation suite was before either
BS6192 (British Pascal Standard of 1982) or ISO Pascal which was at least a
year or two later.

FWIW: My memory is hazy as to when pc showed up.  It would have had to have
been a few years after Johnson's PCC was at UCB since it used the PCC code
generator and libc, although it had its own libpc which supported Pascal
I/O semantics that then called into the C runtime.

Note: our students used pi/pix. But the autocorrect stuff in the front end
(which was a bad idea in practice) was already there, which I have talked
about in other messages.

Clem


Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 6:24 PM Will Senn via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> My algol60 dive took me into uncharted (for me) waters. It was fun, but
> eventually I tacked back and came across, Oh! Pascal!, a recommendation
> I believe Clem gave me. Well, interestingly enough, but not directly
> unix related, the code in that book runs with fpc -Miso, meaning the
> free pascal compiler with the iso option for 7185. So, I'm covered on
> running it in the modern world, but as usual, I'd prefer to run it like
> it was run back when, on a system that might have been used, at the time
> to work through the book.
>
> My first step back from today took me to 211bsd, it has a reasonable
> environment, has pi and px and oughtta work, but... it doesn't really.
> It'll do basic stuff, sure. But it lacks pc and a more complete
> compiler, particularly function as argument:
>
> program FunctionArgumentDemo;
>
> function Square(x: integer): integer;
> begin
>    Square := x * x
> end;
>
> function Cube(x: integer): integer;
> begin
>    Cube := x * x * x
> end;
>
> function Apply(function f(x: integer): integer;
>                 value: integer): integer;
> begin
>    Apply := f(value)
> end;
>
> begin
>    writeln(Apply(Square, 5));
>    writeln(Apply(Cube, 3))
> end.
>
> # pi -s arg.p
>       1  program FunctionArgumentDemo;
> E ----------------------------------^--- Expected '('
>      13      function Apply(function f(x: integer): integer;
> e -----------------------------------^--- Replaced '(' with a ','
> E 13 - Procedure/function parameters not implemented
>
> Which is reasonable, turbo pascal 3 didn't have function arguments, but
> Standard Pascal iso 7185 supports it... I want it :).
>
> So, my question is, does this ring a bell for anyone? ChatGPT seems to
> think that a VAX 4.1 might be in use around the '82-'85 timeline of the
> 1st and 2nd edition.
>
> Cooper references quite a rarified list of folks in the preface to the
> 82 edition, so I'm inclined to think he had access to what was current
> at Berkeley at the time (he calls McKusick one of the "Kompiler Kids").
>
>