title: Pastel (programming language)
text: # Pastel (programming language)
  
  Pastel is an extended version of the Pascal programming language, created in c. 1982 for Amber, an operating system for the S-1 supercomputer project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The Pastel compiler was the inspiration for Richard Stallman's GNU C compiler.
  
  Pastel was conceived by Jeffrey M. Broughton, then Project Engineer in charge of compilers and operating system software for the S-1 project, because of dissatisfaction with the PL/1 language in which Amber was being implemented. The language was named Pastel ("an off-color Pascal").
  
  Compared with Pascal compilers of that period, Pastel's features included:
  
  * Improved type definition
  * Parametric types
  * Explicit packing and allocation control
  * Additional parameter passing modes
  * Additional control constructs
  * Set iteration
  * Loop-exit form
  * Return statement
  * Module definition
  * Exception handling
  * General enhancements
  * Conditional boolean operations
  * Constant expressions
  * Variable initialization
  