Pastel (programming language)

Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in 1982 for Amber, an operating system for the S-1 supercomputer project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The Pastel compiler was the inspiration for Richard Stallman's GNU C compiler.

Pastel was conceived by Jeffrey M. Broughton, then Project Engineer in charge of compilers and operating system software for the S-1 project, 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:

  • 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
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.