Pastel (programming language)

Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in c. 1982 for Amber, an operating system for the S-1 supercomputer project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.^[1]

Pastel was conceived by Jeffrey M. Broughton, then Project Engineer in charge of compilers and operating system software for the S-1 project,^[2] because of dissatisfaction with the PL/1 language in which Amber was being implemented. The language was named Pastel ("an off-color Pascal") and was the inspiration for Richard Stallman's GNU C compiler.^[3] Compared with Pascal compilers of that period, Pastel's features included:^[4]

• 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

1. Mark Smotherman. "S-1 Supercomputer (1975-1988)". Archived from the original on 2014-02-01.
2. Mark Smotherman (June 28, 2005). "S-1 Supercomputer Alumni". Archived from the original on 2014-02-01.
3. Frankston, Charles (1984). "6 Implementation". The Amber Operating System (Thesis). MIT. Retrieved 2014-02-01.
4. Jeff Broughton. https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_llnls1S1Op_10037358/S1_OpenHouse_Apr85_djvu.txt. Retrieved 2014-02-01. Missing or empty |title= (help); |chapter= ignored (help)