From: ercs50@castle.ed.ac.uk (atholl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Whither the Next ANSI Pascal Standard? (Breath of Life)
Date: 21 Aug 92 13:58:37 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: Edinburgh Portable Compilers Ltd.

P. Hawthorne asks "whither the Pascal Standard?"

The answer is that there is a new, much larger, standardized dialect
of Pascal called Extended Pascal. It was the culmination of about 10
years successful collaboration between standards bodies working in 
Europe and the USA. Extended Pascal is both an ISO and ANSI standard.
The ISO publication is "ISO 10206 - Programming Language Extended
Pascal". I'm sorry I can't remember the ANSI number. The two standard
documents refer to the same language so this is an improvement on 
existing Pascal where the ANSI standard omits the conformant array
feature.

Extended Pascal is a much larger language than ANSI Pascal. It 
includes a powerful module feature, parameterized types (called
schemata), string and complex data-types, direct-access files, 
richer control structures and data-initialization, and lots more.

Unfortunately there's a down-side to all this. 

First, although the standards bodies did good work, they did not go 
out of their way to look at what had become de-facto industry practice. 
So the module construct bears no resemblence to UNIT construct in 
Turbo Pascal. 

Second, Extended Pascal was overtaken by events (Modula-2, Oberon, 
C++), and contains no features for Object-Orineted programming.
The standards bodies have tried to rectify this by having a working
party produce a very good technical paper on proposed O-O features
for Pascal. However, they are not part of Extended Pascal, but may
become part of Extended Extended Pascal.

Third, Extended Pascal has received almost zero publicity in the 
press. How many of you have heard of it? Moreover, there are no
text-books, so they only way you can get to know about it is by
buying the very expensive ANSI or ISO standard. Are there any
journalists out there, prepared to do the Pascal world a service
by writing some articles ... ?

Fourth, no-one to my knowledge has implemented ALL of Extended
Pascal. Its very big and these days with the hype surrounding 
C++ its a very big risk for a compiler company to invest the 
couple of years effort needed to do the complete job. 

Fortunately there are a number of partial implementations which
between them cover MS-DOS, Unix and VAX:-

(1) I believe that the latest releases of VAX Pascal incorporates
    a substantial portion of Extended Pascal. I believe they have
    the type-schemata feature.

(2) A small UK company called Prospero has an MS-DOS compiler
    for a substantial subset of Extended Pascal. Their UK 
    address is:-

    Prospero Software Ltd,
    190 Castelnau,
    London,
    SW13 9DH
    Tel:- (+44) 81 741 8531
    Fax:- (+44) 81 748 9344
    Email:- uad1117@dircon.co.uk

(3) At EPC, we do a subset of Extended Pascal for (all sorts)
    of Unix systems. Our subset is similar to Prospero's. We
    do modules, strings, complex, da-files etc, but not type
    schemata. To sample contact:-

    Support Office,
    Edinburgh Portable Compilers Ltd,
    17 Alva Street,
    Edinburgh,
    EH2 4PH
    
    Tel:- (+44) 31 225 6262
    Fax:- (+44) 31 225 6644
    Email:- support@epc.ed.ac.uk


Atholl Hay
EPCL
21.08.92