Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in 1982 for ''Amber'', an operating system for the S-1

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

project at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. The Pastel

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

was the inspiration for

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

GNU C compiler The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes GCC as free software ...

. Pastel was conceived by Jeffrey M. Broughton, then Project Engineer in charge of

s and

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

software for the S-1 project, because of dissatisfaction with the

PL/1 PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced and sometimes written PL/1) is a procedural, imperative computer programming language initially developed by IBM. It is designed for scientific, engineering, business and system programming. It has b ...

language in which Amber was being implemented. The language was named Pastel ("an off-color Pascal"). Compared with Pascal compilers of that period, Pastel's features included: Chapter: S-l Software Development: Programming Languages Supported *Improved type definition * Parametric types *Explicit packing and allocation control *Additional parameter passing modes *Additional control constructs *Set iteration *Loop-exit form *Return statement *Module definition *

Exception handling In computing and computer programming, exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence of ''exceptions'' – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – during the execution of a program. In general, an ...

*General enhancements *Conditional Boolean operations *Constant expressions * Variable initialization

References

{{reflist 1982 software Pascal (programming language) compilers