The experience is about taking the P-Code of P2 Pascal compiler and run it through a P-Code interpreter, so it can compile Pascal source code into P-Code.
This was a personal experience to be is sort of similar situation of the time people would bootstrap a Pascal environment on a new computer.
This was inspired and made possible by the work of Scott A. Moore who documented these early version of Pascal, provided the source files adapted to Pascal ISO 7185, and provided a project that makes the bootstrap possible by producing the compiler P2 code.
I also consulter the original untouched sources files of both the interpreter and compiler that can be found here.
The first experience was to translate in a rather raw form the Pascal Interpreter from
Pascal to Python. This is what is found in the translation/ folder.
This gives a very not pythonic source code, but somehow faithful to the original Pascal source code. This is now how you would write a Pascal interpreter in Python from scratch. The experience was to port the code as is.
The system compiles and runs the following sample files:
- hello.pas
- roman.pasq
- qsort.pas (provided you add a newline avec the final "END.")
- the compiler itself (needs extra storage space, compared to the original interpreter source)