Customer Reviews

Pascal User Manual and Report: ISO Pascal Standard

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a complete and authorative definition of the ISO Standard Pascal language. Unlike the official ISO standards document, this is highly readable, with explanations and examples. The ISO Standard Pascal language is implemented by most of today's highest-quality compilers, including GNU Pascal, Prospero Pascal, Compaq Pascal, Dr. Pascal, and pix. The newer Extended Pascal language is a proper superset of the Standard Pascal language described in this book.

The book that *defines* Pascal, the seed of the underlying Delphi language. Use it to get a concise definition for the procedural parts of Delphi, while learning linked lists, binary trees, pointers, and more. You'll have to work with this text, (i.e., think!), but it is still the most straight-forward presentation of the Pascal language.

If you remember Pascal, you're probably dating yourself. I sure remember it. Reading this book is a real bit of nostalgia.

Pascal was originally intended as a teaching language only. It's wide commercial acceptance was a bit of a surprise. Many millions of lines of commercial Pascal appeared in the 80s, and I admit I wrote a few tens of thousands of them. Funny thing was that none of the commercial Pascal compilers were pure ISO Pascal. All of them had some kind of non-standard extensions. Pascal was OK for about 98% of systems programming tasks, but that last two percent dealt with device drivers, multithreading, absolute memory addresses, and other stuff that the academic language never needed.

These days, Jensen and Worth isn't the Bible of programming any more. Well, maybe the Old Testament, but the world's moved on. (Remember "railroad" syntax charts? They're still here.) I need the historical information, though, and that's about the only reason you'd need this.

//wiredweird