11 Facts About UCSD p-System

The UCSD p-System did not sell very well for the IBM PC, because of a lack of applications and because it was more expensive than the other choices.

UCSD p-System achieved machine independence by defining a virtual machine, called the p-Machine with its own instruction set called p-code (or pseudo-code).

Urs Ammann, a student of Niklaus Wirth, originally presented a p-code in his PhD thesis, from which the UCSD p-System implementation was derived, the Zurich Pascal-P implementation.

The UCSD p-System implementation changed the Zurich implementation to be "byte oriented".

The UCSD p-System p-code was optimized for execution of the Pascal programming language.

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UCSD p-System began around 1974 as the idea of UCSD's Kenneth Bowles, who believed that the number of new computing platforms coming out at the time would make it difficult for new programming languages to gain acceptance.

UCSD p-System based UCSD Pascal on the Pascal-P2 release of the portable compiler from Zurich.

UCSD p-System was particularly interested in Pascal as a language to teach programming.

UCSD p-System introduced two features that were important improvements on the original Pascal: variable length strings, and "units" of independently compiled code.

Pascal dialect of UCSD p-System Pascal came from the subset of Pascal implemented in Pascal-P2, which was not designed to be a full implementation of the language, but rather "the minimum subset that would self-compile", to fit its function as a bootstrap kit for Pascal compilers.

UCSD p-System added strings from BASIC, and several other implementation dependent features.