[mbessey]

Performance of the p-System is definitely an issue on the Apple II, especially in the "OS" interface and editor, which is all interpreted. But running applications built on it wasn't half-bad.

It's also important to remember that to a large extent, Apple Pascal on the Apple II and other late 1970s home computers wasn't competing with sophisticated native-code compiler suites, but with interpreted BASIC and with assembly language.

Pascal was vastly more-productive than writing in Assembler, and much faster in execution than Apple BASIC. It even had reasonable support for integrating assembly routines for places where you really needed the speed.

The p-System was A LOT more usable on the HP Motorola 68k workstations I used it on. Those were more than adequately fast for the sort of software we were writing for them in 1985.

Thanks for the link to cuneiform, I think I read that paper once, long ago. Will definitely check it out.

[kragen]

The interpreted BASIC on most home computers was Microsoft BASIC-80, which, as I remember it, was also painfully slow. There were lots of programs in it, and it was good enough for some games, but for the most part "real software" for those computers was written in assembly language. Even Turbo Pascal was written in assembly language, not Pascal.

I think now we know how to do better.