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by kwhitefoot 1021 days ago
Surely it is a feature of all Pascal compilers that they are single pass. I thought that it was part of the specification of the language that it be possible to compile in a single pass.
4 comments

It's disturbing to me that I remembered this, but the IBM Pascal Compiler for DOS (1981) had two passes. https://winworldpc.com/product/ibm-pascal-compiler/100
Not all, although the language was designed that way.

Some dialects and optimising compilers, had multiple passes.

There's a bunch of LLVM-based Pascal compilers these days. I doubt they are single pass, given how LLVM works. (And in general, any optimizing compiler is most likely doing multiple passes.)

You are right about Pascal's original design. Though I'm not sure if that's still true about modern versions of the language?

Not even old ones, if we taken optimising compilers like VMS Pascal into account.
Microsoft Pascal was a two-pass compiler. It was slower to compile than Turbo Pascal and that pissed off Bill Gates when he realized than Turbo was the most successful.