Re: [TUHS] Looking back to 1981 - what pascal was popular on what unix?

[Rob Gingell <gingell@computer.org>]

On 1/29/2022 11:59 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Sun later brought the UCB PI and PC to the SunOS, but pls Rob G/Larry 
> correct me here - I think they later did their own compiler when they 
> did their new C and Fortran. 

Sun never replaced the UCB Pascal front-end, just moved it across 
back-ends as it evolved them.

The development of SPARC required Sun to develop back-end expertise. 
Although the investments focused on SPARC, there was also work on the 
back-ends for the Motorola- and Intel-based products.

Sun's front-end investments began with the SVR4 project as an ANSI C 
compiler was needed. (A priority for SVR4 was conformance with 
then-current external standards such as POSIX and ANSI. Over the course 
of SVR4's development strict ANSI conformance came to be seen as 
problematic: most SV licensees didn't just use the release as delivered 
and instead merged portions into their extant, and not ANSI, product 
source code bases. This led to some late-in-the-project de-ANSIfying of 
the source in the interest of making SVR4 more digestible by the licensees.)

That C compiler was the basis for the unbundled C compiler product that 
came out at the time of SunOS 4.1.

Sun's larger investments in front-end development were motivated by the 
later transition from F77 to F9X. Which is another data point in support 
of Clem's frequent observation that FORTRAN is a big deal in parts of 
the real world. At that point Sun tended to its own front ends for C, 
C++, and FORTRAN but Pascal was always the UCB front end.