People's Pascal I (Based on Byte's Tiny Pascal)

[natcha]

When I had my Radio Shack Model I, I spent a lot of time playing with the Tiny Pascal programming system that was published as People's Pascal. The neat thing about this system was it was based on Byte's series of articles on Tiny Pascal. The Editor/Compiler, Interpreter and Z80 translator was all written in Level II Basic. Using the Z80 translator, you could create native Z80 system tapes that executed very fast, when compared to basic.

For the past few years, I have wanted to play with this system again. A gentleman here was kind enough to give me the files so that I could use the various emulators to again experience the fun.

While it is fun to play with, the most time consuming and error prone part is the typing in the source code to the editor/compiler. If I could just enter the source into a PC file and then transfer it to the emulator.

I started with entering the Byte Compiler basic code into the PC, and then modified it to run in BASICA. The compiler will read a Pascal program file (without line numbers) and then generate a file of p-codes for the program.

Using Turbo Pascal 3.0, I have created a program to take the p-code file and then generate a TRS-80 CAS file that can then be fed to the People's Pascal interpreter or translator running in an emulator. I've tested it on several programs, and it seems to be working fine.

My next step is to use Turbo Pascal to develop a program to take the p-code and generate the z80 code in a CAS file. Final step would be to include the Pascal runtime system with the z80 CAS file to end up with a CAS file that could be directly loaded into the emulator as a System tape.

It's been a lot of fun as well as a lot of time learning how the CAS is formatted, etc.

If anyone is interested in this, I would enjoy hearing from you. I can also send the files to anyone who wants them.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

 

[Porkbelly]

This is very interesting. I've been working to decode several commercial game programs that were packaged using the People's Pascal system.
The game developer also converted the runtime by hand to also work on 6502 systems for cross-platform sales to Apple and Atari machines.
Since the translation of the program pseudocode code simply issues a sequence of JSR's (followed by a few bytes of data as parameters) to the runtime, the p-code can be figured it once the purposes of the function calls into the runtime are understood.
It would be great to get copies of the files so I can try to do some reverse engineering and de-pseudocode the programs without having to spend too much time figuring out the runtime.