[brightsize]

Oh Pascal!, oh the nostalgia. I saved up the princely sum of $80-$100 back in TRS-80 Model III days to buy the Pascal 80 package, the New Classics version, which was basically a proto-IDE, and a pretty sweet one at the time. http://www.trs-80.org/pascal-80/ I recall it being a huge step up from the M-III BASIC dev environment and the games and utilities I wrote ran well enough in the 48K of RAM that was available. I wonder what became of the Pascal-80 codebase? Not that it would be any better than the modern tools available for retro hardware, probably far worse. Oh yeah, "Oh Pascal!" was the book from which I learned the language, and I doubt there were many other options, as this predated Pascal's commercial use by quite a few years.

[alwillis]

Anyone can check out Oh! Pascal! [1] just like a library book.

Even now, it's one of the best introductory programming books for any programming language.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/ohpascal0000coop/mode/2up

[vram22]

I was interested to revisit the book, but when I tried, it says:

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS download 1 file ENCRYPTED ADOBE PDF download High Quality Page Images

In order to access your downloaded book you will need LCP-compliant or Adobe-compliant software on your device. The Internet Archive will administer this loan, but Adobe may also collect some information.

That's a turnoff.

[alwillis]

Thanks for the update… I’ve only checked out books, not download them.

[vram22]

Welcome.

[fuzztester]

Wow.

"Oh Pascal!" was a fantastic book, both for the content (going from beginner to a bit intermediate (1), in a single, not too thick book) and for the fun and engaging writing style, and with very good production values too, meaning the book's appearance.

IIRC, it was written by one or two US postgraduate college students or professors. My uncle, who was himself a college professor in the States, brought it for me on one of his visits to us, as a present, because he knew I was learning computers.

And during that visit, I wrote a small scientific program for him in Turbo Pascal, to use in his lab.

(1) Why I said "a bit intermediate" is because it had, near the end of the book, a program to do text concordances, and maybe one or two other non-trivial ones too.