[Simh] Pascal 1.3 manual for RSX 11 4.6 - warning, nostalgia trip!

[brian]

On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 02:23:30 +0100, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>
wrote:

<snip>

>
>> I missed the thread about ODT, but I sure remeber having to use it,
>> The debugger supplied with the compiler was just about capable of
>> debugging 'Hello world' before the code got so large that it broke the
>> limits, even with overlays. All of our debugging had to be done by
>> compiling to MACRO and then patching breakpoints into the executable.
>
>I don't think I've seen anything about any other debugger provided with 
>RSX Pascal, so I would assume that you only had ODT to choose from. Are 
>you saying that there was some other debugger provided as well? That 
>could be interesting to look at. Oregon PASCAL certainly do not have 
>any. (Unless my memory is playing tricks with me, I have the manual 
>somewhere...)
>

I am absolutely 100% certain that we DID have another debugger with
our version of Oregon Pascal (we got it not long after I joined
Marconi, in late 1982 or early 1983). There was no RSX Pascal at that
point. We were the first group in our division to use Pascal, all the
earlier software had been written in FORTRAN-IV-PLUS or MACRO-11. I
was told to try the debugger out, but I found it to be unusable for
all but the most trivial programs because the memory footprint of the
task was just too large. You ended up using something like 28 KB of
your 32KB if you compiled in debugging code to a trivial program and
then added in all the debugger libraries. 

It would not surprise me in the slightest if OMSI discontinued it with
later versions of their Pascal - perhaps it was even a separate
package when we bought it? Too far back in the mists of time for me to
remember that clearly, I'm afraid...


Brian.