Waterloo Pascal Primer and Reference

Charles R. Crawford, a former associate professor of computer science at
York University, is a computer programming and mathematics consultant in
Toronto.

The programming language PASCAL has become nearly as popular as BASIC. The Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo have designed and implemented their own version of PASCAL on a variety of machines. The Reference Manual describes how the language can be used on particular machines.

Waterloo PASCAL has several features not included in standard PASCAL. A curious restriction in Waterloo PASCAL prohibits reference to procedures that are not defined in the program or predefined in the language. There are, however, many useful predefined procedures — procedures for the manipulation of character strings, for example.

The specific implementation described in the user’s guides are both interpreters with built-in editors. The editors are designed so that the programmer can run a program directly from the editor and return to the editor when the program stops. The Commodore 64 interpreter has predefined procedures that use the extensive colour graphics facilities on the Commodore.

Both the reference manual and the user’s guides have tutorial sections at the beginning, which introduce the PASCAL language through carefully graded examples. Each tutorial is written assuming no previous experience with computers, but little will be learned if a computer is not available to run the example programs.