Power System Programming In Pascal

PASCAL, a relative newcomer among high level programming languages, is compared with FORTRAN for power system programming applications. PASCAL is briefly described and fea- tures of interest for power applications are pointed out. A sparsity-oriented short circuit analysis program is developed in both languages and comparisons are made of their time and storage requirements. Also, an informal comparison is made of less quantifiable items, such as length of source code, readability, ease of coding and debuging and ease of maintenance. Based on use of a rather unsophisticated PASCAL compiler, FORTRAN shows a speed and memory advantage of 2 or 3 to 1 . Part of this is probably inherent in the languages, but most of the differences could be elimi nated by some simple extensions to the PASCAL language and changes in the compilers. PASCAL shows definite advantages in terms of the less tangible measures. This paper points out that PASCAL-based languages are going to be widely used in military and other systems and suggests that it deserves serious consideration for power system applications.