Pascal User Manual and Report

by Niklaus Wirth and Kathleen Jensen

Book Overview

, A preliminary version o~ the programming language Pascal was dra~ted in 1968. It ~ollowed in its spirit the A1gol-6m and Algo1-W 1ine o~ 1anguages. A~ter an extensive deve10pment phase, a~irst... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0387901442
• ISBN13: 9780387901442
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 167 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

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.