alt Hacker NewsDo you think computing history would have been much different if Microsoft made a 6502 Pascal interpreter instead?
Replies
SoftTalker • today at 3:38 PM
They didn't invent the language. BASIC was already a popular language for beginners on microcomputers at that time.
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dboreham • today at 4:56 PM
Except that wasn't possible. Languages like BASIC and Forth exist because they were the only kind of language implementable in 4K with no disk. Pascal in its smallest form (UCSD p-system) still needed disk overlays. The smallest C compilers were poly phase, needing storage for intermediate state.
Pascal is a lot broader language and won't fit in sub 16KB of ROM (even if you exclude monitor [call-151])