Experiences porting Pascal source from a micro computer to a Vax
Herbert G. Mayer · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1984
In March 1984, I ported a good sized Pascal project from an Intel 8086-based micro computer to a Vax11/780. The Pascal compilers on both systems had been implemented long before the Pascal standard [2] was accepted in 1983; consequently neither compiler adheres exactly to the standard. The "Pascal-86" compiler on the Intel micro computer is a user friendly, multipass implementation with various extensions over the standard. Tne Vax Pascal compiler is the Berkeley "PC" implementation running under Unix, version 4.2.I anticipated this task with great pleasure, because I expected that I would be replacing a slow development machine with a fast runner. Also this was an opportunity to test my main design goal which was the writing of software that can be rehosted and retargeted with no effort. By "no effort", I mean that the software can be reconstructed from existing programs with less than 1% of the time of rewriting it altogether.My main goal was successful. In this article, I describe the porting project and list a few surprises encountered along the way. This report was inspired by Sites, who describes a rehosting effort similar to mine in [1].