Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in 1982 for Amber, an operating system for the S-1 supercomputer project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.[1] The Pastel compiler was the inspiration for Richard Stallman's GNU C compiler.[2]
Pastel was conceived by Jeffrey M. Broughton, then Project Engineer in charge of compilers and operating system software for the S-1 project,[3] because of dissatisfaction with the PL/1 language in which Amber was being implemented. The language was named Pastel ("an off-color Pascal").
Compared with Pascal compilers of that period, Pastel's features included:[4]
- Improved type definition
- Parametric types
- Explicit packing and allocation control
- Additional parameter passing modes
- Additional control constructs
- Set iteration
- Loop-exit form
- Return statement
- Module definition
- Exception handling
- General enhancements
- Conditional Boolean operations
- Constant expressions
- Variable initialization
References
edit- ^ Mark Smotherman. "S-1 Supercomputer (1975-1988)". Archived from the original on 2014-01-11.
- ^ Frankston, Charles (1984). "6 Implementation". The Amber Operating System (Thesis). MIT. Retrieved 2014-02-01.
- ^ Mark Smotherman (June 28, 2005). "S-1 Supercomputer Alumni". Archived from the original on 2014-01-03.
- ^ Jeff Broughton. "THE S-l PROJECT: Advancing the Digital Computing Technology Base for National Security Applications". Retrieved 2014-02-01. Chapter: S-l Software Development: Programming Languages Supported