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by mustntmumble 1204 days ago
I'm somewhat bemused that your school ran the toy ISO Pascal on a VAX, because VMS came with its own version of Pascal! VAX/VMS Pascal had some cool language extensions that made it extremely suited and extremely popular for VAX/VMS Systems Programming! VAX Pascal supported native VMS strings intrinsically whereas in VAX C you had to use cumbersome string descriptors to pass strings from C to the VAX/VMS RTL or Starlet (System Libraries). Ah happy memories, I miss VAX/VMS...
2 comments

It might have been the full DEC pascal but we were taught to write standard Pascal.
I was in college in the early 80s at UCSC, the VAXen were running BSD UNIX. Many of the professors hated C, and made us use UCSD Pascal, which had uh, limitations... Like fixed size arrays and oh, the free function didn't actually free anything.