Pascal for ZX81

[jdfan1000]

So, I took the scans of the Partial Pascal manual, converted them to one PDF and hired someone on Fiverr to do the initial retyping. The Fiverr person did a pretty good job; I only had to do some light editing throughout the document.

Attached is my first pass through. I've started marking up the text, differentiating between instruction and typed code with typography. I'm also going to insert screenshots where it makes sense.

Best,
David

[mrtinb]

Wow! This is brilliant.

[jdfan1000]

Ok, I believe I've finished cleaning it up and apply typographic magic.

This will also be on archive.org any minute now.

[siggi]

Great!

Thanks a lot
Siggi

[zx-heinz]

It seems there is no direct way to write a program, to compile it afterwards and run immediately. You have to save in between. Is this true or am I wrong?

[jdfan1000]

That's my read: write the program, compile, then load for execution. I think it's more a system for teaching Pascal than for anything actually useful.

[mrtinb]

Yes, you have to save in between. And saving is to the program’s own tape format. So the only way to use the program is to save to real tape, or the wave tape in the Eighty One emulator. No binary file format can be used.

The only way to run a program is in this environment as well. No machine code is generated, as mentioned in my previous post. It seems to be generating some sort of p-code, which is like byte code in the Java world.

[stefano]

well, if it has a p-code (or similar interpreter), that is definitely interesting

[mrtinb]

It does not look like other p-code documentation I’ve found. It seems it has it’s own proprietary p-code.

I had hoped I could make a plain machine code binary with this program, but unfortunately that will require a lot of hacking, including having the interpreter in the binary as well.

[Vorticon]

Just saw this thread. I am a big fan of Pascal, so this awesome and a big step up from Basic even without pointers support. I'll be curious to see how much faster than Basic the compiled programs run since it seems that it compiles to p-code and not machine code.