Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in 1982 for Amber, an operating system for the S-1 supercomputer project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The Pastel compiler was the inspiration for Richard Stallman's GNU C compiler.
Pastel was conceived by Jeffrey M. Broughton, then Project Engineer in charge of compilers and operating system software for the S-1 project, because of dissatisfaction with the PL/1 language in which Amber was being implemented. The language was named Pastel ("an off-color Pascal").
Compared with Pascal compilers of that period, Pastel's features included:
- Improved type definition
- Parametric types
- Explicit packing and allocation control
- Additional parameter passing modes
- Additional control constructs
- Set iteration
- Loop-exit form
- Return statement
- Module definition
- Exception handling
- General enhancements
- Conditional Boolean operations
- Constant expressions
- Variable initialization
References
Mark Smotherman. "S-1 Supercomputer (1975-1988)". Archived from the original on 2014-01-11. http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1.html ↩
Frankston, Charles (1984). "6 Implementation". The Amber Operating System (Thesis). MIT. Retrieved 2014-02-01. https://www.mit.edu/~cbf/thesis.htm#Implementation ↩
Mark Smotherman (June 28, 2005). "S-1 Supercomputer Alumni". Archived from the original on 2014-01-03. http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1_alumni.html ↩
Jeff Broughton. "THE S-l PROJECT: Advancing the Digital Computing Technology Base for National Security Applications". Retrieved 2014-02-01. Chapter: S-l Software Development: Programming Languages Supported https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_llnls1S1Op_10037358/S1_OpenHouse_Apr85_djvu.txt ↩