80-Bus News

Pascal – The Language and its Implementation, ed. D.W.Barron,
published John Wiley 1981

This is collection of papers on the subject of the programming language Pascal and the problems of its implementation. Some of the papers have been previously published, but are not elsewhere available. This book substantially arises from the proceedings of a symposium on the same subject. It carries a reprint of Niklaus Wirth’s ‘Pascal-S: A Subset and its implementation’, which is useful as a complete example of a compiler for study.

This latter is also the subject of –

Programming Language Translation, by R.E.Berry
published Ellis Horwood (distrib. John Wiley) 1981

In this volume, Berry deals with the problems of translating the source language into the version of the program which can be understood by the target machine. The author gives the text of the Pascal S compiler in toto, and makes lavish use of this in his discussions, concluding with the most useful blow by blow account of the purpose of each proceedure, and the uses it makes of the various data structures of the compiler in the organisation of the code. I would recommend this book over the preceeding for those who are interested in getting an idea of what happens (and how) in a compiler.

Pascal Programs for Scientists and Engineers, by Alan Miller,
publ. SYBEX

This is a collection of assorted programs in Pascal which may be of use to people handling data or figures. It is a well laid out and very readable book, but quite expensive, so one ought really to see it first before buying it, to make sure that you needed it. The programs given include Mean and Standard deviation, Vector and Matrix operations, solution of simultaneous Linear equations, curve fitting, sorting, integration, Bessel functions, non linear curve-fitting. It does not (unfortunately!) include a Fast Fourier Transform, which is a pity.

Software Tools in Pascal, by Kernighan and Plauger,
publ. Addison Wesley 1981

Further to my notes in the last 80-BUS News, I have now received a copy of this. It is a revision of the earlier book, Software Tools, using Pascal as the language of implementation rather than RATFOR and PL/I. In doing this, it gains in readability and ease of application. Its philosophy on the construction of a series of tools of general application, which are well documented and modular, so that any maintainence or modifications are easy to implement, has been one of the most outstanding breakthroughs of the last decade. Nobody who has read these authors has been unaffected by their approach.

Pascal Implementation, by Daniels and Pemberton,
publ. Ellis Horwood (John Wiley),

This is a fully commented listing of the P4 Pascal assembler, complete with the necessary interpreter to run the compiler. It does not, contrary to my impressions from the advance publicity, list the Pcodes produced by the compiler compiling itself. In consequence, it would be necessary to cross compile the compiler on another machine, having a full Pascal implementation. The source for the P4 compiler takes up in excess of 160 Kbytes, so cross compiling on a micro-computer will be difficult, to put it mildly.