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Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

turbopascal.org

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Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#51

Post by ido »

jgord wrote: post #9
barrkel wrote: post #4

This site doesn't describe the internals of Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler. It describes a compiler written in Turbo Pascal that can compile some subset of Turbo Pascal's language. Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler was written in 16-bit x86 assembly, mostly by Anders Hejlsberg. There is an explanation of this on the front page of the site, but it's not clear from the headline. (I used to work at Borland on the Delphi…

.. thats the story I was hoping to read, and have been waiting for, for many years. I went from the necessity of A86 assembler, thru the desperation of GW-Basic .. finally finding Turbo Pascal, which was a revelation at the time, just this phenomenal product and superb piece of engineering. Pulldown text menus, draggable text windows, editor out of the box .. fast compilation, wow - to me its one of the great monumen…

Lightspeed Pascal (later renamed THINK Pascal) was a similarly solid compiler+IDE from about the same era for the early Macintosh.

Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#52

Post by vidarh »

baldfat wrote: post #30
pjmlp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pascal and C compilers produced similar code quality back then. Everyone praises C compiler quality nowadays. On those home computers, C, Pascal and Modula-2 were good enough for general purpose applications, if one wanted real speed, Assembly was the only way to go. Turbo Pascal, as well as any other Pascal dialects, had the same capabilities to access hardware as C offered. Also the MS-DOS game development scene an…

I think people who were using computers in the 1980s have their baseline for speed as Assembly and anyone from the 1990s on have C as their baseline of speed. Man I hated reading or figuring out other's Assembly code and Turbo Pascal was a dream in comparison (And Fortran also)

C compilers tended to be atrocious back then. I remember "porting" some code from C to assembler by compiling it, disassembling it, and then patiently going through several thousands lines of asm output and adding labels etc. as well as deleting on average every second instruction or so, because the compiler was so bad at optimizing register usage.

Seeing disassembled code like that kept me from learning C for years...

Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#53

Post by ido »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
antimagic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have very fond memories of just how blazingly fast Turbo Pascal was at compiling on my Mac. It stunned me every time. I remember spending most of one summer writing a text adventure game with it, based in the Australian Gold Rush. It even had NPCs which was quite advanced for text adventures of the day (I think the only NPCs in adventure games that I had encountered up to that point were those in the Hobbit, and of…

Well you also had Apple's Object Pascal as the original OS system programming language, which was the inspiration for the OOP approach Turbo Pascal adopted. With that one, you could surely do graphics programming on the Mac. As for Turbo Pascal itself, I wasn't aware it was available on the Mac as well.

A more popular alternative to Apple's MPW on the mac was the 3rd party Lightspeed Pascal (later renamed THINK Pascal), which in many ways was quite similar to Turbo Pascal on the PC.

IIRC TP was just a quick port & had a very short life on the mac.

Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#57

Post by vetinari »

analog31 wrote: post #45
jgord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. thats the story I was hoping to read, and have been waiting for, for many years. I went from the necessity of A86 assembler, thru the desperation of GW-Basic .. finally finding Turbo Pascal, which was a revelation at the time, just this phenomenal product and superb piece of engineering. Pulldown text menus, draggable text windows, editor out of the box .. fast compilation, wow - to me its one of the great monumen…

My dad, who knew nothing about computers, saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about this guy with a new business model for selling software. On a whim, he got me a copy for my birthday. It was TP version 1. I stuck with TP through version 5, and even convinced my college teachers to let me use it for my programming assignments rather than whatever was on the college mainframe. The manuals were indeed a huge ass…

I learned programming by digging through TP6 online help.

That and Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, so I could do something useful.

Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#58

Post by tedunangst »

doodpants wrote: post #56
mahouse wrote: post #54

I'm triggered by the lack of diversity in that story. I am pretty sure Niklaus Wirth was actually black, but that fact was hidden by white male zealots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

You must be part of the cover up.

Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#59

Post by Olivier26 »

vidarh wrote: post #48
Olivier26 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, in Europe the Amstrad was less expensive than the Commodore and hence far more popular. The CPC 6128 was probably at this time the less expensive computer to run Turbo Pascal. The Apple II has an optional Z80 card, but the total price was not for everyone, at least in Europe.

I don't remember the 6128 being cheaper than the C128, and the prices I've found online doesn't seem to support that either. I'm sure it might have been the case in some markets, or some configuration (since the C128 could be bought without a hard drive and without a monitor) but it seems far from universal. Amstrad also sold far less than C128. The whole Amstrad CPC line sold about 3 million vs 5 million C128's. I d…

The floppy disc reader was required for CP/M (and a 80 column monitor), so the comparison is with the C128 + 1571 or with the C128D. If in 1985 the C128 had been cheaper than the 6128, I'd have bought the Commodore instead.

Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

#60

Post by pvg »

barrkel wrote: post #4

This site doesn't describe the internals of Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler. It describes a compiler written in Turbo Pascal that can compile some subset of Turbo Pascal's language. Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler was written in 16-bit x86 assembly, mostly by Anders Hejlsberg. There is an explanation of this on the front page of the site, but it's not clear from the headline. (I used to work at Borland on the Delphi…

Turbo Pascal was originally written for and targeted the (8-bit) Z80, unless Wikipedia has it backwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal#CP.2FM_and_DOS_ve...

The Turbo Pascal compiler was based on the Blue Label Pascal compiler originally produced for the NasSys cassette-based operating system of the Nascom microcomputer in 1981 by Anders Hejlsberg. Borland licensed Hejlsberg's "PolyPascal" compiler core (Poly Data was the name of Hejlsberg's company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor. Anders Hejlsberg joined the company as an employee and was the architect for all versions of the Turbo Pascal compiler and the first three versions of Borland Delphi.

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