On Jan 30, 2022, at 10:08 AM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 8:58 AM David Barto <david@kdbarto.org> wrote:

Yes, the UCSD P-code interpreter was ported to 4.1 BSD on the VAX and it ran natively there. I used it on sdcsvax in my senior year (1980).

This reminds me of a question I've had percolating in the back of my mind.

Was USCD Pascal "compiled" or "interpreted" or both?

UCSD Pascal was “compiled” into the byte code of the interpreter. I wrote a P-code assembler in my senior year as part of the compiler class. Java started out doing the same thing and over time native code generation was added in gcj.

Just for the record: There has been the WD9000 chipset which is actually an LSI-11 with different Microms which could run the P-code (of UCSD Pascal III) natively as it was its machine code. So this makes a distinction of interpreted vs compiled even more fuzzy.

Holger