"DoN. Nichols" wrote in message
...

I wounder how a machine control program which resembles Pascal
would be to work with.

Enjoy,
DoN.

The semiconductor test stations I worked on used a DEC dialect of
Pascal, with a few Assembly hardware drivers. Programming test
routines wasn't difficult as long as we paid close attention to
variable typing, which meant bits and short integers in that
application. We designed the hardware registers to mesh cleanly, like
one status bit per byte rather than grouping and masking them.

I've written a fair amount of hardware interfacing code in QBasic,
which is part way between Pascal and C, with the structure and typing
available but not as mandatory, and a single level of pointers that
enables reckless variable abuse such as embedding a machine language
interrupt routine as a String.

I really liked having GOTO for exception handlers so they didn't
clutter the main DO Loop structure. I wasn't about to ask the
professor for formal permission to do an emergency shutdown.

The last step in the test station's troubleshooting procedure gave the
software manager's home phone number. He wasn't too happy when
National Semiconductor called him at 3AM Eastern time.
jsw