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History of Apple's Pascal Poster
Lucas Wagner writes "Circa 1979, a strange poster was over nearly every programmer at Apple Computer. The "Syntax Poster" adorned offices, cubes, and even dealers. It was created by Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs. It was half art, half code. My uncle was a printer at the time and gave me one of them, thankfully, because they don't exist anymore.
In researching the poster's origins, Raskin told me its history. I found it to be so interesting that, with his permission, I thought it would be a good article for fans of Apple trivia."
Twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used as evidence against us in code review?
Uhh, I meant, err, a Beowulf cluster of them? Yeah, that's it. Sorry 'bout that other thing back there.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
From the referenced page: The amount of work and planning to do such a thorough charting of the syntax must have been large.
Actually, my old copy of Wilson and Addyman's "A Practical Introduction to Pascal" has (a standard version of) this chart in Appendix I. Mine's the second edition, but the first edition was published in 1978. I know I've seen earlier versions as well.
One of the distinct advantages of Pascal was that its syntax was so straightforward that creating a "railroad normal form" chart like this was relatively simple. You could easily write a parser for the language from scratch as a term project, without parsing tools like lex/yacc.
... of course you did, Jef