Re: UCSD p-System for the Macintosh

[Info-Mac]

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From: info-mac@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: Re: UCSD p-System for the Macintosh
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Date: Fri, 21-Dec-84 20:01:08 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.281
Posted: Fri Dec 21 20:01:08 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Dec-84 00:32:59 EST
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Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: cornell!vax135!ariel!hou4b!hou5f!hou5e![email protected]

I bought the UCSD Pascal p-system with my Mac recently. I have not used it very much
but I am rather disappointed with it. It is NOT a Mac product; it is merely a
68000 port of their other PC-based p-systems-
all their utilities are keyboard
based and make absolutely no use of the mouse; they have to compensate even for
cursor keys by substituting weird key combinations.
the documentation that comes with it is generic; a small supplement
describes how to use it on a Mac, but this is mostly how to make it work on a
Mac - not special Mac features.
very little support for Mac features (menus, windows, graphics) - a
small library with a few drawing routines, I think.
all files reside in a 'p-volume' which is itself a Mac file, so you
cannot access files outside of the p-system environment.
it produces p-code that will run only in the p-system environment.

Leaving behind the aforementioned issues, the p-system is probably as good as
the ones developed for other systems, which I understand, is very good.

SofTech does also have a Macintosh development environment for Pascal- mouse
editor, full access to quickdraw routines, etc. This seems to have come out
much later than their original p-system. (I should have waited for this.)
My understanding is that it produces stand-alone code (not p-code) that does
not need a support environment to run.

I am still interested in my p-system for the Mac and would like to run software
developed for other p-systems (that is supposed to be the beauty of p-code).
Also, I want to develop a p-system library to gain full access to th Quickdraw
routines.

If you do go with the p-system, keep in touch; perhaps we can help each other
out.

Happy Macking,
Irwin Walkenfeld
AT&T Information Systems Laboratories
Holmdel, NJ
....!hou5e!ihw