Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

techtinkering.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 118 posts

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#71

Post by analog31 »

chihuahua wrote: post #6

The 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…

Young musicians who are thinking of pursuing music as a career are often given the advice, that doing something that they really enjoy as a hobby can become a burden when it becomes a job.

A hobby lets you choose your own battles, work on your own schedule and terms, gauge your progress by simple measures such as personal satisfaction or helping someone with their own life. Career means all of the ** that comes with the job, and doing mostly stuff that other people want.

Granted with music it's a bit more extreme, since a middle ground of doing fun work for subsistence money doesn't really exist.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#72

Post by sigzero »

augustk wrote: post #68
KronisLV wrote: post #48

It 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. https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

True but it is also exponentially more obscure in usage.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#73

Post by FpUser »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #18
FpUser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is discouraged in Pascal as well. Can give really nasty surprises with scoping / debugging. Well to me it is mostly gossip as I refuse to use WITH in my Pascal code so no practical experience.

It’s different in Pascal l, iirc: in JavaScript with has dynamic scope in and affects every function you call inside the work statement; in Pascal, it has lexical scope. I used it all the time in Delphi and don’t recall any real issues.

It is a habit. I use Delphi all the time even now as one of my currently active projects is written in it. I just do not use WITH.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#74

Post by augustk »

sigzero wrote: post #72
augustk wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

True but it is also exponentially more obscure in usage.

Indeed, for a long time there was no freestanding compiler (Oberon is also an operating system) which you could use to create programs on any computer. The OBNC compiler, which transpiles to C, solves this problem:

https://miasap.se/obnc/

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#75

Post by outside1234 »

froh wrote: post #9

I really wonder how Pascal and the Pascal family of languages, including modula/oberon and ada, how they became niche and how java and c++ took over the world?

Both UNIX and Windows used it for their operating system APIs.

If you wanted to play in those ecosystems, you had to learn C at the beginning. People wanted to play in those ecosystems. :)

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#76

Post by jksmith »

Oh, the tricks I pulled off with TP back in the late 80's-early 90's. Paged memory managers, HP inkjet and pcl libraries, text window managers, parsers, compressors, sorts and searches, my youngest son as a toddler thinking the 3.5 floppy on my work machine was a slot to put quarters...Fun stuff, good times.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#78

Post by jksmith »

KronisLV wrote: post #48

It 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…

FPC/Lazarus gets my vote for a great FOSS project. Going strong for three decades now.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#79

Post by DennisP »

When I was in high school, I wrote lots of stuff in BASICA and spent long hours with printouts spread over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to figure out what was going wrong. I'd seen articles about "structured programming" and felt it would stifle my creativity.

One dad Dad brought home Turbo Pascal. To try it out I implemented Conway's Game of Life. Once I got past my syntax errors, I was shocked when it worked correctly the very first time. I never wrote another line of BASICA.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#80

Post by markus_zhang »

chihuahua wrote: post #20
pan69 wrote: post #7

Earlier 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 many years, I'd get frustrated with jobs where the projects were invariably limited to copying and caching data. I kept moving from one job to the next, hoping to find something better. Life is better now that I'm no longer searching for that elusive unicorn.

Now that you are older and much more experienced, have you considered the following?

1) Find some worthy students and be their mentor

2) Do Program something you really want or enjoy, e.g. a game or a new language

Post reply on HN