Writing Externals in Pascal?

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Wed Jul 7 14:18:47 EDT 2010


On 07/07/2010 08:56 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> Whoa! Pascal still lives?? Maybe I am not so old after all.
>
> Bob
>
>
>    
Sorry to dash your illusions; I studied PASCAL 5 in 1985;

Thee and Me are alive, and so is PASCAL; neither Thee, not
Me, nor PASCAL are as young as we were in 1985.

Hey; anybody remember MINIFORTRAN?

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I remember when I was visiting Mum and Dad at New Year
seeing my PASCAL final project lurking in the attic; maybe
I should get it out and 'give it a whirl'. Mind you typing the
whole thing into the machine will be a real labour of love.

What I do remember is:

1. It was a program for making a concordance of a text.
    [This was conceived because I was sent 'over' from the
     Philosophy department to the Maths dept. for computer
     programming. The lecturers all made loud and public
     fun of the "wierdo in the kilt from the Philosophy dept"
     and said that ONLY mathematicians could program;
     and that PASCAL, being a serious, hairy-chested sort
     of computer language, could only deal with crunching
     numbers - hence my determination to crunch text].

2. A long-suffering 'slave' in the computer building
     (full of enormous tape drives that went "whirr, whirr")
     typed in an English translation of Leibniz's 'Monadologie'.

3. The program crashed the University computer (hurrah,
     hurrah - let's hear it for Mathewson).

I will probably be able to run it on a Pentium II I have,
running FreeDOS with the GEM GUI (lovely job) and
some sort of cheapo PASCAL - in all likelihood the 32 MB
RAM is more than the University of Durham had in 1985.

4. An incredibly seedy man who was my computer
     supervisor almost tied himself in knots having to admit
    that my program was the best of the 100 students in the year.
    Extra fun was had because I asked the head of Philosophy to
    accompany me to the meeting so that I could make a formal
    complaint about departmental bullying towards me because
    I was an Arts student.

About once every 5 years I go back to Durham to visit . . .
. . . the pubs where I did most of my studying; and everytime
I pass the building that housed the VAX (I wonder what is in
there now?) I blow it a kiss - Wow I wish my life now was
as much fun as when I was an undergraduate!!!!



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