Re: Pascal. Some people on here might not be aware, but the excellent FreePascal compiler has a Mac Pascal compatibility mode. I've been exploring the possibility of "porting" LisaOS to a new abstraction layer (would require a rewrite of QuickDraw and other assembly-written portions of course) that could run as an application on Linux or something like that.
Something like this was actually the reason I wrote the Clascal grammar for the compiler project I mentioned elsewhere --- instead of aiming for binary compatibility, I was wondering if it might be possible to achieve source compatibility for ToolKit apps that would compile to Python.
The python code itself wouldn't aim to be usable in other Python applications: instead, the Python interpreter would behave like an extremely CISCy microprocessor, with compiled subroutines/objects/methods using a large array of bytes (a megabyte or two) as a stand-in for the Lisa's RAM. Pointers would work in this scheme: they'd just be array indices. Integers in the array would be stored in the "RAM" in big-endian order, just like in the Lisa: in fact, the idea would be to try to store all user-defined "stack" and "heap" data in the same way that the Lisa would store them.
The hope is that this would be a development aid for people who wanted to write new ToolKit applications (for you see I would have written a runtime that recreated the ToolKit as well): if it compiled and worked under this system, then you could be reasonably confident in it compiling and working on the real Lisa.
Naturally this would have been a huge undertaking, but the pandemic had not been going for very long by then and who knew how long we were going to be cooped up at home? Anyway, we got as far as the parser.
