Pascal

When I was first interested in Pascal for the Apple II, my major concern was probably money.  If I remember correctly you had two choices for Pascal; Apple Pascal and Kyan Pascal.  Apple Pascal at the time was considerably more expensive as it seemed to be aimed more at the commercial market.  Kyan Pascal was aimed more at the individual who wanted to write small programs and get his feet wet with Pascal.

Other than money, there is another fairly major difference between them, the operating system.  Apple Pascal used its own operating system, the Pascal Operating System and Kyan Pascal used Apple’s own ProDOS Operating system.  I have never had the kind of relationship that many other Apple II people have with DOS 3.3, I like ProDOS.  I didn’t want to use a different operating system just to program in.  Apple Pascal used a p-code system which is interpreted at run time while Kyan Pascal compiled the code to assembler and then to object code. Programs written with Kyan Pascal can co-exist on the same disk with programs written in Applesoft or assembler.