The Atari Pascal Language System (usually shortened to Atari Pascal) is a version of the

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

programming language released by

Atari, Inc. Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Atari was a key player in the formation of the video arcade and video game industry. Based primarily around the Sunny ...

for the

Atari 8-bit family The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE, ...

of home computers in March 1982. Atari Pascal was published through the

Atari Program Exchange Atari Program Exchange (APX) was a division of Atari, Inc. that sold software via mail-order for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers. Quarterly APX catalogs were sent to all registered Atari 8-bit owners. APX encouraged any programmer, not j ...

as unsupported software instead of in Atari's official product line. It requires two disk drives, which greatly limited its potential audience. It includes a 161-page manual.

Development

Atari Pascal was developed by MT Microsystems, which was owned by

Digital Research Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS and ...

. It's similar to MT/PASCAL+ from the same company. The compiler produces code for a virtual machine, as with

UCSD Pascal UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (UCS ...

, instead of generating machine code, but the resulting programs are as much as seven times faster than

Apple Pascal Apple Pascal is an implementation of Pascal for the Apple II and Apple III computer series. It is based on UCSD Pascal. Just like other UCSD Pascal implementations, it ran on its own operating system (''Apple Pascal Operating System'', a derivati ...

. MT Microsystems wrote Atari Pascal with a planned "super Atari" 8-bit model in mind, one with 128K of RAM and a dual-floppy drive. This machine never materialized, but the software was released because of pressure within Atari, though only through the Atari Program Exchange.

References

1982 software Atari 8-bit family software Pascal (programming language) compilers Atari Program Exchange software {{compu-lang-stub