I don't have strong feelings about Pascal; it wouldn't be my first-choice language if I were starting from scratch.
That was the high level language to use in the late 70s. I'm going to make the argument in the blog post that the
Lisa software system is an evolution of the HP 300 Amigo because of all the experienced HP engineers that worked
on the project. I spent the last few days looking at the source dates, and 1982 is the earliest date in most of it.
Almost all of the system is written in Lisa Pascal. Quickdraw is the biggest assembly-language library.
I've not dug into the code generator much. DTC claimes Mac Pascal added a peephole optimizer. I wonder how much optimization exists in the Lisa compiler.
The Mar 1983 Computer Design article on the development of Lisa says the Office System is 90,000 lines of code and the development system is 100,000
The most radical change to the Pascal Development System was the adoption of the 7/7 file system in release 3.
I will probabaly have to write a much longer internals document at some point. The biggest flaw I see with the architecture is how to deal with tools that expect old versions of the intrinsics (the shared library versioning problem). I suspect that a few of the workshop tools like Basic Plus and COBOL don't work at all in Workshop 3.
It's been an interesting adventure finally getting to see the code I wasn't able to get access to in the 80s, but ultimately Apple took a very different path, much like what happened with A/UX.
