On Tue, 2026-06-23 at 12:50 -0700, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk wrote: > > > I actually LIKE Pascal!
After I finished my first compiler class in the 1983 UC Santa Cruz Summer Institute in Computer Science (taught by Frank De Remer and Tom Pennello), a group in another section approached me to write a compiler for a "little language" called MENDEL, for Menu Definition Language. It was about putting boxes on a screen with response buttons, the kind of thing that would be done today using HTML etc, which didn't exist yet. Two guys in the group had worked for a year and produced nothing more than some low-level run-time library, in Fortran for a VAX. I wrote the MENDEL compiler in 90 days, in Pascal, using the framework I learned at UC Santa Cruz. It generated FORTRAN 77 code. My group supervisor reported it to the Section Manager to report to the Division as part of the monthly Section Significan Events report. He suppressed it.
