[Jim answered Wes] > > > >I don't know. Apple started out with Pascal. I don't know how much they've > >shifted to C, but there's probably a correlation. > > > > For what its worth Apple originally wanted to go with Ada as their > main high level language when they transitioned from asm. But they > could not get any of the ada vendors interested in doing a compiler > for mac. eventually they did but it was to late apple had already > gone with pascal by that time. i got this from one of the original > development team. > > jim Interesting! I hadn't heard that one. Just one of a long sad string of Ada's missed opportunities. As I've said many times, Mac folks and Ada folks ought to be natural allies, because both groups are underdogs. But the main Apple and Ada developers have mostly just pointed to each other and said "not interested, small market." It's even more ironic that in the very early 80s when Apple got started with Lisa, which led to Mac, Microsoft's influence was much more limited. There was MS-DOS, and some old ROM Basic's in the 8-bit machines like Atari 800s. But Windows was years away and Word was hardly a gleam in Gates' eye. It's too bad Ada didn't get in on the ground floor of that one. There are lots of interesting historical ties between Ada and Pascal (beyond the obvious syntactic ones): for example, one of the very earliest Ada compilers (for a decent subset of Ada 83) came from TeleSoft, and was, essentially, a modification of UCSD Pascal. Not surprising, as Ken Bowles was a TeleSoft founder. UCSD Pascal was ported to lots of micro platforms at the time, and was the first language beyond MS-BASIC to appear on the IBM PC. It was also on the Apple ][. UCSD Pascal compiled to "P-code", of course, which was executed on the P-machine interpreter. Java was NOT the first virtual machine by a long shot (neither was UCSD Pascal, but that is another story...). Well, back to the (non-)subject. AFAIK Apple is now pretty much stuck in C/C++, for new code anyway. Since OS X is based on NextOS, and Next used Objective-C for pretty much everything, I wonder how much Objective C there is in OS X? Mike Feldman