Software Tools in Pascal is a rewrite of Software Tools by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger. In the first book Kernighan and Plauger wrote their programs in RatFor, a dialog of Fortran implemented via a preprocessor, which gave Fortran a C-like syntax. In attempting to repeat this effort using Pascal, Kernighan apparently developed a dislike for the language and in the same year Software Tools in Pascal was published he also published his famous rant Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. I will address this rant in a later post.

My intention here is to re-write the programs in Software Tools in Pascal using Turbo Pascal, an implementation of the language that became a de-facto standard. I will admit up front that this effort is entirely academic. I'm doing it for fun. Still, some people might find it useful. The tools K&P presented were, even at that time, pretty much available pre-packaged in DOS and Unix, so even the original books were something of an academic effort...