Talk:SuperPascal

Please remove the "primary sources" complain box

Per Brinch Hansen, was a pioner in computer science. He's research was mainly in concurrent programming, the key programming kind to build operating systems.

Although Professor Brinch Hansen, said that SuperPascal was a publishing language for parallel programming. It is more than that.

I am learning about SuperPascal, but I am not a beginner. In my experience, SuperPascal is more than a publishing language, it is closer to an specification language. Today it could be turned a "parallel programming procedural specification language", if it is completed with a formal semantics and a programs algebra.

When Per Brinch Hansen wrote SuperPascal, he knew C.A.R. Hoare's work on concurrent programming, CPS, and the Occam language, that he used in his research. A formal operational semantics and algebra of programs for SuperPascal, at that time was not an easy task. I believe that he talked about a publication language instead of an specification language because he didn't work the detailed work in that direction. I ignore if he did some work on that direction in the part of the 2000s decade that he lived, when the research in formal semantics had given fruits to complete the needed work to make SuperPascal an specification language, although in practice it is used as one.

Concurrent programming is a hard subject to study, very few people can master it as hi did, like C.A.R. Hoare (CPS and Occam), Robin Milner(CSP). E.W.Dijkstra, Carl Hewitt (actors), the authors of Simula and others working in concurrent programming topics like Process Algebra.

For that reason the main sources are primary, although it was an original work that is because it is pioneer work in computer science, very influential to those working in the operating systems development, and concurrent programming. It is general interest subject for those readers searching about concurrent programming, not just researchers, but students taking courses in operating systems principles, too.

SuperPascal is not easily available to work in Intel based PC's, the mentioned compiler was written for Sun workstations. That makes it less popular, than other programming languages.

You may consider to remove the "primary sources" banner, because as I said above, 'it is a pioneer work, very influential in computer science', something very far from a very specialized work that only two guys in the world are interested in. SuperPascal is a clear notation for parallel programming, that people working in parallel programming may use as pseudocode in their work, but make no more research on it.