Microsoft Pascal is a discontinued implementation of the Pascal programming language developed by the

Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

for compiling programs for running on its MS-DOS and Xenix operating systems and, in later versions, on

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

(like many other Microsoft programming tools, albeit they are only capable of generating 16-bit programs for the latter).

Overview

Microsoft Pascal version 1.0 was released in 1980. The last version of Microsoft Pascal to be released was version 4.0 in 1988, when Microsoft Pascal was superseded by Microsoft QuickPascal, a cheaper development tool that Microsoft produced in order to compete with Borland's Turbo Pascal. Microsoft Pascal was priced at , whereas QuickPascal was priced between , and the differences between the two were similar to those between Microsoft BASIC Professional Development System and Microsoft

QuickBASIC Microsoft QuickBASIC (also QB) is an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE) and compiler for the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. QuickBASIC runs mainly on DOS, though there was also a short-lived version for the c ...

. Unlike the ISO-compliant Microsoft Pascal product, QuickPascal went after the ultimate compatibility with Turbo Pascal. This included not only source-level compatibility, but rather complete binary compatibility with widely available unit libraries for the competitor's compiler. To achieve this level of compatibility, QuickPascal moved away from the common file format (OBJ) and tool set (LINK, LIB) shared by Microsoft's other compilers.

References

;Notes * Jon Udell, Clash of the Object-Oriented Pascals, BYTE, July, 1989. * M.I.Trofimov, The End of Pascal?, BYTE, March, 1990, p. 36. Pascal Pascal programming language family {{compu-lang-stub