My first exposure to programming came in college in 1998, we used Turbo Pascal to learn programming concepts.
It absolutely went over my head at the time, I just couldn't grasp it for the most part! And there began my life long journey to understand this thing called programming!
Over 20 years later and I am still bamboozled and confused frequently, but it's my living these days!
Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
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Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#62Nostalgia!
I learned programming in my own time on 1980's 8-bit machines, but in college it was Pascal on Vax VMS then Turbo Pascal on, IIRC, an Act Sirius. Loved the language.
Then along came JPI TopSpeed Modula-2 (Pascal++ [joke]) and even though I now do C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and FreePascal, nothing matches the sheer productivity and performance that TopSpeed provided. And their IDE was incredible at the time (though Turbo Pascal 3 having a compiler and editor in around 40KB was technically more awesome).
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#63This is the environment where my programming really took off from amateur to, well, less amateur. It was so fast to compile and so ergonomic compared to the alternatives. Great stuff.
Yes, I prefer it over C if I had to program in any of these languages. It feels higher level despite it really isn't very much, just a smidge that will often not matter technically, however it will for a developer.
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#64Pascal is under-appreciated. TurboPascal was my first programming language/platform on PC (used 286 in 1994) and the only problem I had was lack of documentation on actual video and sound hardware, not with the language itself.
I was surprised to learn that many DOS-era games I loved were written in pascal actually, some of them were pretty performant (Tyrian, for example).
Almost on the topic: in Russia there were popular school computers UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC, pdp-11 clones with deep changes, with an RT-11 compatible OS. They were everywhere, well into late 199x, when they were deeply obsolete, because schools didn't have funding to upgrade classrooms. It was my first computing platform when I was a kid, but the only language accessible was BASIC, with a line editor (pretty strange concept nowadays), line numbers, no named subroutines, etc. In 1997 I was suprised to find in a new school I've transfered to the same old computer but with Pascal compiler on it. With an actual editor, a very fast compilation time, and all still crammed into 64kb of memory. I was really impressed.
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to feel this way, and I wanted to rekindle the fire I felt when I was younger and absolutely in love, mesmerized with writing software. After a few years of that, I went into the professional world, and can relate to how you and others in this thread feel, about the dullness and lack of satisfaction. I remembered those times, though, and I kept looking for something to do. I realized what the difference was: B…
Yeah, back in the days I was in the demoscene, coding for fun. 25 years later, I started coding demos, on Apple 2 (yep, that old machine I had when I was kind). You can call it nostalgia, but hey, that's coding for fun, pushing the machine to the limit, taking time to optimize for speed or memory instead of customer's satisfaction. Plus you get to meet other passionnated people, like before. So yeah, it's somewhat "g…
I am going trough the same stage and started developing the game that I wanted to develop as a kid on my first home computer: a Commodore 16. At the time I learnt to program in 7501 ASM ( a 6502 derived CPU ) but the endeavour was too much for a kid given the tools of the time.
Nowadays is way easier: I have a sort of IDE built over emacs, can easily design ( and rip ) sprites and charsets, can mix code in macro ASM and a C-like language and can easily debug on an emulator. It's really a joy!
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, back in the days I was in the demoscene, coding for fun. 25 years later, I started coding demos, on Apple 2 (yep, that old machine I had when I was kind). You can call it nostalgia, but hey, that's coding for fun, pushing the machine to the limit, taking time to optimize for speed or memory instead of customer's satisfaction. Plus you get to meet other passionnated people, like before. So yeah, it's somewhat "g…
Nice! I decided to go back to the old Web days and write something which really does work in ANY browser. So far, I've reached back to Netscape 2.x and Mosaic :)
So all you need is Safari support. Should be easy right. Jeeve Stobbb$
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#67Turbo Pascal is great and I love the fact that it uses the Wordstar key combinations. I wish that there was a version for 8080 but I understand why they went with the Z80. Borland went on to create Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M which was very similar to TP but with lots of language enhancements and faster execution time of the resulting binaries. However, it was released quite late in 1986 and quickly withdrawn.
I was the co-author of Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M. It was quite a capable system to fit in less than 64K. Great memories. At the time Borland intended to develop their own version of Modula-2 for IBM PC, so they bought ours as a complement for the CP/M versions they were still covering. But the in-house version got delayed a lot. It was eventually released as Topspeed Modula-2 several years later, from a spinoff. If Bor…
University of North Dakota used Modula-2 as its language for CompSci starting in Summer 88 (not sure when they switched away from it). I get the feeling some of the decision was because they had a version running on the IBM 370 under CMS. XEDIT was an interesting editor.
I liked it but remember the I/O commands were frustrating as heck. It would be interesting to C-syntax it and see what the reaction is.
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#68It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal ( https://www.freepascal.org/ ) and the Lazarus IDE ( https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) both of which seem like stable, open and capable projects. That said, i'm afraid that modern Pascal isn't awfully popular, which hurts its practicality a bit (e.g. learning about it, finding tutorials and others' experience with it, getting help). However, it's a…
> It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal
The latest language from Niklaus Wirth is Oberon which was last updated in 2016. It is both smaller and more capable than Pascal.
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment comes as a kick in the gut to me. I feel the same but didn't realize it until I read your comment.
For me, programming has become largely unappealing since the advent of cloud computing (which happened shortly after I entered the market). I really miss the first years of my career.
I also miss my early years, writing programs on a BBC Micros or for Windows 3.0 in Turbo Pascal for Windows. Now everything seems sanitized and no longer challenging.
I think it's the learning experience and result we crave.
Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
#70The first software "product" that I sold was created using Turbo Pascal running on DOS. I was in high school at the time. It was designed for an Orthodontist who wanted to input (using a tablet with a cross-hair "mouse") about 20 points from an X-ray of a patient's head, then perform some calculations on the geometry to predict how the jaw bones and teeth were going to develop as the patient gets older. To this day I…
I used to feel this way, and I wanted to rekindle the fire I felt when I was younger and absolutely in love, mesmerized with writing software. After a few years of that, I went into the professional world, and can relate to how you and others in this thread feel, about the dullness and lack of satisfaction. I remembered those times, though, and I kept looking for something to do. I realized what the difference was: B…
I've had a similar experience. Every time I get a glimmer of an idea of something I'd have fun building, my thoughts immediately go to my devops workflow, hosting, cross platform, updates, testing, security, tax, patents, viability assessment... and my professional experience has suffocated my idea before I've even built a fun prototype just for myself.