Pascal User Manual and Report: ISO Pascal Standard

by Kathleen Jensen and Niklaus Wirth

puter system. In 1971 one computer system had a Pascal compiler. By 1974 the number had grown to 10 and in 1979 there were more than 80. Pascal is always available on those ubiquitous breeds of computer systems: personal computers andl professional workstations. Questions arising out of the Southampton Symposium on Pascal in 1977 [Reference 10] began the first organized effort to write an officially sanctioned, international Pascal Standard. Participants sought to consolidate the list of questions that naturally arose when people tried to implement Pascal compilers using definitions found in the Pascal User Manual and Report. That effort culminated in the ISO 7185 Pascal Standard [Reference 11] which officially defines Pascal and necessitated the revision of this book. We have chosen to modify the User Manual and the Report with respect to the Standard - not to make this book a substitute for the Standard. As a result this book retains much of its readability and elegance which, we believe, set it apart from the Standard. We updated the syntactic notation to Niklaus Wirth's EBNF and improved the style of programs in the User Manual. For the convenience of readers familiar with previous editions of this book, we have included Appendix E which summarizes the changes necessitated by the Standard.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387976493
• ISBN13: 9780387976495
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The classic

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

The definitive yet readable standard for Pascal

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.

Old, but Still Useful to Delphi Programmers

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.