[kabdib]

These are indeed the places where Apple extended their version of Pascal. C-style calling convention support, pointer arithmetic, much better I/O, and a host of things I can't remember. Suffice to say that when I started working at Apple (towards the end of the Pascal era) I was pretty comfortable, even though I'd been doing mostly C for a long time. This was definitely not the language we had to use in college.

(No tagged unions, though. Systems guys are allergic to 'em, apparently).

Apple also added object-oriented features, but I don't count those as addressing anything borken or awkward in the base language.

[kragen]

Well, in the base language you couldn't store function pointers in variables or record fields, since they might refer to nested subroutines that included a context pointer to their parent subroutine stack frame, and invoking them after it had returned would be catastrophic. This “downward funargs restriction” made OO-style programming in standard Pascal very difficult in a way that it isn't in standard C. So I think the OO features, too, aimed at a weakness of the base language—but I admit I never looked at Apple's version.

[kabdib]

Apple's Pascal had function pointers, and I'm pretty sure you could still do callbacks to nested procedures with a little trickery.

Ahh, I was right (PDF file here): http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/tec...

These are not closures, they're still strictly nested and on the native stack, so the usual crashes happen if you execute a callback to something that has gone out of scope.

Remind me to tell you about "Fork Queues", a solution we had on the Newton for dealing with multiple entities that all wanted to have the main event loop (of which you could really only ever have one, but we cheated).

[kragen]

Oooh, this sounds fantastic!