Hi!
Is it posible to write OS in Borland Turbo Pascal 6.0 ?
And could I use RAWRITE to write it to a bootdisk?

Also, Assuming you know enough programming to make an OS in pascal,
why not just make one in ASM?

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Most OS today are programmed in C, so if you want to look at examples,
you have to learn this language. Linux would be an obvious place to start
looking, as the complete source code is available.

"Dr E. Buxbaum" <E...@le.ac.uk> (if that's who you really are) wrote:

ldb

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dortmund, stardate 9357.08,

 l> > Is it posible to write OS in Borland Turbo Pascal 6.0 ?
 l> > And could I use RAWRITE to write it to a bootdisk?
 l>
 l> I'm not an expert on this, but I believe that even if it was possible,
 l> it would be illegal by way of Borlands legal agreement with you.

why should it be illegal?

Magnus

If the question is whether Pascal has enough capabilities to be used
as an OS language then the answer is yes.  After all, the first version
of the Chorus microkernal was written in Pascal.

ae...@pgfn.bc.ca (Eric Thompson) once said:

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Kim Robert Blix  ( kb...@sn.no  &  http://home.sn.no/~kblix )

Slpo...@Concentric.Net allegedly said:

S> >>Also, Assuming you know enough programming to make an OS in pascal,
S> >>why not just make one in ASM?
S> >
S> >Nobody would nowadays program a project of this size entirely in ASM. The
S> >effort to maintain such a program (or group of programs) would be to
S> >great. Such programs are written in high level languages, with some ASM
S> >thrown in for direct hardware access or in performance critical routines.
S> >TP from version 6 onward could do this easily because of the build in
S> >assembler, BP could even generate 32 bit OSs. At least one command
S> >interpreter, 4DOS, is in fact programmed mostly in TP (and boy would I
S> >love to see their source!).
S>
S> I **LOVE** 4DOS and have used it for years (almost as long as I've had
S> a PC).  Even so, I had no idea that it was written in TP, how did you
S> find that out?  Do you know if InCommand (their Windows command line
S> processor) is written in TPW/BPW?  How about 4OS2?  I wonder if JP
S> Software would be willing to at least offer advice on large projects
S> or difficult system access issues, into which they MUST have a great
S> deal of insight.

4DOS is _not_ written in Turbo Pascal; it's written in C and assembler.
However, the 4HELP system IS written using Turbo Pascal.

: > I'm not an expert on this, but I believe that even if it was possible,
: > it would be illegal by way of Borlands legal agreement with you.

Borland's No-Nonsense License doesn't say that you can't. In fact it says
that you may sell any app you create (in non-source form). While there
could be a technical argument that an OS is not an app, Borland's license
has always been pretty straight forward. If you write it, you may do
pretty much what you want with it w/o royalties.

: Why should he use assembler? Nowdays we use highlevel languages like
: C/C++ even when writing OS, so I can not se any problems here,

Although an OS would be tighest in asm, it would also be the least
portable and the hardest to debug. OS's are often written in an HLL
nowadays, and Modula-2 is a "child of Pascal" that was intended for system
work since it supports a type of multitasking called coprocessing. C was
the OS language for unix. HLL's are good for this kind of work (but not
every HLL -- you need some pretty low level hooks).

Assembler is best used by most people as a strategic tool for time
critical portions of code. Remember the 80-20 rule ...

We've written on OS in Modula-3, which is a successor of Pascal.
Modula-3 supports threads, garbage collection, open arrays, and
just about whatever you need.  A few things were implemented in
assembler (entry to trap handling, atomic enqueue/dequeue operations,
etc.).

I think that Pascal probably is a decent language to program an OS
in.  However, I suggest that you look at Modula-3 instead.  You can
get a very good free Modula-3 compiler from DEC SRC.  Check it out:
http://www.research.digital.com:80/SRC/modula-3/html/

You can also get a commercial version of Modula-3 from Critical Mass.
http://www.cmass.com
try the evaluation copy of it.  Both the DEC SRC and the Critical Mass
compilers work on Linux, hp/ux, windows NT 3.5.1, 4.0, and windows 95.
Many other platforms are supported, as well.

You can find out more about our operating system from
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/spin/www/index.html

Ciao,

On 20 May 1997 14:25:15 GMT, "Dr E. Buxbaum" <E...@le.ac.uk> wrote:

[deletia]

[deletia mas]

Learn something new every day!

Regards,