Pastel (programming language)

Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in c. 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
  1. Mark Smotherman. "S-1 Supercomputer (1975-1988)". Archived from the original on 2014-01-11.
  2. Frankston, Charles (1984). "6 Implementation". The Amber Operating System (Thesis). MIT. Retrieved 2014-02-01.
  3. Mark Smotherman (June 28, 2005). "S-1 Supercomputer Alumni". Archived from the original on 2014-01-03.
  4. 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
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