Doug Becker writes:

>If it were written in [almost] PASCAL, perhaps some company like IBM (after
>two years of negotiations and contracts), could get the good folks at
>INPRISE to sell them a copy of BORLAND's PASCAL compiler, Delphi, and then
>modify the source to run on all sorts of different hardware.

MODCAL isn't mysterious at all. It's Pascal/iX. The MODCAL extensions are
almost all documented in the Pascal/iX manual. There's a compiler
directive, also documented, $STANDARD_LEVEL 'HP_MODCAL'$, which turns on
these extensions. In theory, it'd be quite simple to modify any Pascal
compiler to accept MODCAL -- almost.

The catch is that some of the MODCAL extensions are very specific to
PA-RISC, like being able to access registers, or understanding its
pointer structure. This is the case with *any* language that's used to
implement an operating system, and it's one of the reasons why you can't
simply recompile an operating system with a different target instruction
set and have a functional operating system on that target.

-- Bruce


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