[katzinsky]

Yeah C does not work well on these odd 8-bit ISAs. Pascal, basic, and PL/M (and fortran?) seem to have been way more common and Pascal environments on these were really on the edge of what the contemporary hardware could handle.

[flyinghamster]

I don't ever recall seeing PL/M compilers advertised by anyone back in the day. I have a feeling that the few that existed were offered at "meet our sales guy at the golf course" pricing.

[jasomill]

PL/M was developed by Gary Kildall for Intel, and the only compilers I've used ran under Intel's ISIS family of operating systems, originally on Intel Intellec MDS hardware, and only much later under first-party ISIS emulation on MS-DOS.

AFAIK, Intel never marketed its first-party development systems to hobbyists, so you're probably in the ballpark with "golf course" pricing.

[PaulHoule]

My take it was the other away around. In its own strange way C was portable to machines with unusual word sizes like the DEC PDP-10 with 36 bit words. I used C on Z-80 on CP/M and on the 6809 with Microware’s OS-9.

In the 1980s there were books on FORTRAN, COBOL and PASCAL. I know compilers for the first two existed for micros but I never saw them, these were mainly on minicomputers and mainframes and I didn’t touch them until I was using 32-bit machines in college

There were academics who saw the popularity of BASIC as a crisis and unsuccessfully tried to push alternatives like PASCAL and LOGO, the first of which was an unmitigated disaster because ISO Pascal gave you only what you need to work leetcode problems, even BASIC was better for “systems programming” because at least you had PEEK and POKE though neither language would let you hook interrupts.

Early PASCALs for micros were also based on the atrociously slow UCSD Pascal. Towards the end of the 1980s there was the excellent Turbo Pascal for the 8086 that did what NiklausWirthDont and I thought was better than C but I switched to C because it portable to 32-but machines.

I’d also contrast chips like the Z-80 and 6809 which had enough registers and address modes to compile code for and others like the 6502 where you are likely to resort to virtual machine techniques right away, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

I saw plenty of spammy books on microcomputers in the late 1970s and early 1980s that seemed to copy press releases from vendors and many of these said a lot about PL/M being a big deal although I never saw a compiler, source code, or knew anybody who coded it.

[pvg]

Towards the end of the 1980s there was the excellent Turbo Pascal for the 8086

TurboPascal was released at the tail end of 1983 targeting CP/M and the Z80. It was hugely popular on the platform.

[PaulHoule]

Correct.

My own experience in Turbo Pascal started with (I think) version 4 when I got an 80286 machine in 1987. In that time frame Borland was coming out with a new version every year that radically improved the language, it got OO functionality in 5.5, inline assembly in 6, etc. I remember replacing many of the stdlib functions such as move and copy w/ ones that were twice as fast because the used 16 bit instructions that were faster on the 80286. With the IDE and interactive debugger it was one my favorite programming environments ever.

[pjmlp]

Having been a Borland's compilers fanboy since Turbo BASIC, all the C++ and TP versions for MS-DOS, a few ones on Windows 3.x, Borland C++ 4.5, and first editions of Delphi and C++ Builder, until their management messed up, it kind of sadens me the zig-zag turns we have had since the 2000 with VMs and interpreted languages, until we finally got the renaissance of AOT toolchains.

If only Native AOT was as easy to produce a binary as a plain Turbo Pascal 6 project using Turbo Vision.

[adrian_b]

Microsoft had FORTRAN and COBOL compilers for CP/M. I have used them on both Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80.

The MS FORTRAN compiler was decent enough. It could be used to make programs that were much faster than those using the Microsoft BASIC interpreter.

Even if you preferred to write some program in assembly, if that program needed to do some numeric computations it was convenient to use the MS Fortran run-time library, which contained most of the Fortran implementation work, because the Fortran compiler generated machine code which consisted mostly of invocations of the functions from the run-time library.

However, for that you had to reverse-engineer the library first, because it was not documented by Microsoft. Nevertheless, reverse-engineering CP/M applications was very easy, because an experienced programmer could read a hexadecimal dump almost as easy as the assembly language source code. Microsoft used a few code obfuscation tricks, but those could not be very effective in such small programs.

[082349872349872]

> There were academics who saw the popularity of BASIC as a crisis...

In particular, a pair of academics at the CWI had their own alternative, ABC, and got help in implementing it from a young Guido van Rossum; this experience presumably came in handy when he created his own scripting language...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)