Welcome to Pascal-P6

[Scott Franco]

Welcome to Pascal-P6. This project is under development.

Pascal-P6's goal is to implement the language Pascaline, a set of extensions to ISO 7185 Pascal.

You will find the specification of Pascaline here:

http://www.standardpascal.com/pascaline.htm
http://www.standardpascal.com/pascaline.pdf
http://www.standardpascal.com/pascaline.docx

The above documents are a bit out of date. I will try to post curent ones soon.
This will give you an idea. I will try to post a "bullet point" of what is implemented here.

Why a Pascal-P6?

Pascal-P6 is an extended Pascal language based on ISO 7185 Pascal. ALL practical Pascal compilers are extended Pascal, including the original CDC 6600 compiler. There are just a few necessary procedures that a practical compiler must have to create real applications, mostly in terms of file handling. The only difference with Pascal-P6 is that I have tried to formalize the specification of the extended language that Pascal-P6 implements, as opposed to simply creating it ad-hoc.

I like the idea of a small compiler/interpreter as a porting kit, language test and proof of implementation. In fact, that was the idea of Pascal-P5. There were no good porting kits/language tests for ISO 7185 available. The ones that had been created had been scooped up and placed for sale when Pascal was in its most popular phase (despite being advertised by their authors as "public domain", but I won't get into that here).

There is another compiler, IP Pascal that is a full, hyper-complex optimizing compiler for Pascaline. The goal with Pascal-P6 is to create a much simpler, but still usable and accurate, implementation of Pascaline.

Relationship with Pascal-P5

I intend to maintain Pascal-P5, which still has outstanding issues, but is quite usable. Some of the tech from this project will find its way back to there from here.

Note that Pascal-P5 is completely compliant with the ISO 7185 Pascal language of Pascal-P5. Pascal-P6 is able to replace Pascal-P5 in all cases.

Pascal-P6 implementation language

Another interesting characteristic of Pascal-P6 is that it is written entirely in ISO 7185 Pascal, without extensions. This despite the fact that it compiles/interprets a much bigger language. This allows Pascal-P6 to be bootstrapped on any ISO 7185 compliant compiler, of which at this writing there are several.