In the 1980s an Australian programmer, Nick Gammon, published a Pascal development system for the Commodore 64 and Apple][ called G-Pascal.

In spite of it being a p-code based interpreter (based, like a lot of others, on the BYTE Tiny Pascal from 1978), it was amazingly fast, and it was a life-line to teenage me who was wanting to go beyond BASIC and assembler. I even used it for writing my first-year University programming assignments. The G-Pascal software cost $80 in 1986, and was totally worth it-- I couldn't wait to actually buy a legal copy! :)

Anyway, last year, Nick Gammon was interviewed online at http://www.supercoders.com.au/blog/nick ... scal.shtml (Read it!), and he's now placed the source code and documentation for the Commodore 64 version of G-Pascal online at http://www.gammon.com.au/GPascal/source/

As the interview mentions, the above source code for the Commodore 64 version of G-Pascal was actually developed on Nick's Apple][ using the Merlin assembler (...and disk drives a lot faster than the 1541..) I certainly didn't have anything that would build it as-is, so I've munged it into cc65/ca65 assembler format, and managed to get a bit-exact (well, the bits that count..) buildable version, which I've put online at http://kildall.apana.org.au/~cjb/G-Pascal/

Thanks for this post. I used to program in Oxford Pascal a bit for C-64. I ported Turbo Pascal 3-D functions (z=f(x,y)) drawing program to Oxford Pascal which worked remarkably fast (I guess program algorithm was good but also p-code interpreter of oxford pascal as well). I also wrote few programs that helped me draw 2-D functions graphs and some simple music programs. They were much faster than their BASIC alternatives I wrote earlier. I had a copy of g-pascal compiler that came to me on some cassette tape (hacked from disk version is my guess) but without manual I could not figure it out. I also could not save programs to tape and since I did not have 1541 drive, it was useless. Perhaps I will give it a try now, since this software became open.

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Marek Karcz
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