News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The cost of forsaking C by S_I on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @10:19AM (#12644000)
>The original Macintosh apps were in Pascal and the MacOS API were all Pascal-oriented.

Yeah, i remember using the Mac OS written in Pascal. Strangely enough, i remember it being buggy as hell and crashing pretty often (no memory protection at all).

Re:The cost of forsaking C by rpeden on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @11:15AM (#12644503)
I've read that large bits of it were written in 68k assembly too, so those parts might be responsible for the crashiness.
Re:The cost of forsaking C by ArkyBeagle on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @05:48PM (#12648216)
You can't write systems programs in Pascal without escape-to-assembly. My first big 'C' project was a significant quality improvement over the Pascal it replaced, partly because of this.
Re:The cost of forsaking C by pjmlp on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:27AM (#12650780)
Funny I managed to do that in Turbo Pascal.

Also C standard library cannot be implemented without using Assembly, unless one makes use of extensions not defined in ANSI C.

Re:The cost of forsaking C by ArkyBeagle on Thursday October 06, 2016 @07:50AM (#12651656)
You mean you managed with assembly, right? We were able to Vastly reduce the assembler footprint when using 'C'.
Re:The cost of forsaking C by pjmlp on Thursday October 06, 2016 @09:10AM (#12652104)
No I managed to do that with Turbo Pascal.

If I was talking about inline Assembly, which Turbo Pascal supported and to this day still isn't part of ANSI C, I would have said so.

The only times I actually was forced to use inline Assembly was to optimize graphics rendering and create a mouse device driver.

Both of them were a one time project.

Once upon a time I used to have some fun asking C devs for features not available in Turbo Pascal, while at the same time showing off all the safety and large project features that Turbo Pascal had and C to this day still lacks.

Back on those MS-DOS and Windows 3.x days there wasn't any feature that C compilers had and Turbo Pascal didn't had a similar feature.

Re:The cost of forsaking C by ArkyBeagle on Thursday October 06, 2016 @06:16PM (#12656583)
How would you do an INT 21 call? It's been too long; I don't remember that being possible except as either just assembler or inline assembler.
Re:The cost of forsaking C by pjmlp on Friday October 07, 2016 @02:24PM (#12662799)
With the MsDos procedure.

    program demo;
    uses Dos;
    
    var
        regs : Registers;
    
    begin
        regs.ah := $02;
        regs.dl := $07;
        MsDos (regs);  { Beep! }
    end.