Microsoft Pascal
Implementation of Pascal programming language
Microsoft Pascal is a discontinued implementation of the Pascal programming language developed by the Microsoft Corporation for compiling programs for running on its MS-DOS and Xenix operating systems and, in later versions, on OS/2 (like many other Microsoft programming tools, albeit they are only capable of generating 16-bit programs for the latter).
01Overview
Microsoft Pascal version 1.0 was released in 1980. The last version of Microsoft Pascal to be released was version 4.0 in 1988, when Microsoft Pascal was superseded by Microsoft QuickPascal, a cheaper development tool that Microsoft produced in order to compete with Borland's Turbo Pascal.
Microsoft Pascal was priced at $300, whereas QuickPascal was priced between $25 and 50, and the differences between the two were similar to those between Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System and Microsoft QuickBASIC.
Unlike the ISO-compliant Microsoft Pascal product, QuickPascal was compatibile with Turbo Pascal. This included not only source-level compatibility, but rather complete binary compatibility with widely available unit libraries for the competitor's compiler. To achieve this level of compatibility, QuickPascal moved away from the common file format (OBJ) and tool set (LINK, LIB) shared by Microsoft's other compilers.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Microsoft Pascal”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Microsoft Pascal.jpg by Microsoft, Public domain
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