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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)

#101

Post by timonoko »

timonoko wrote: post #100
webmobdev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting anecdote - so did the Finnish army actually use your Pascal compiler? And when you say you were ordered to write a manual for it, where you in the Finnish army at that time?

I was in the University Telecom Lab, but employed by the army in a project to specify a portable texting device, which eventually become the well-known Finnish Army "Kyber"-radiotermimal. I specified the operating system of this non-existing device in my own nokoPascal. This was the time I was playing with my symbolic stack machine, a Forth of sort, but wierd metacharacters which allowed direct execution of "(+ 1 2)"…

Oh yes now I remembered it all. I went to army right after that. But I was a Hippie at the time and concious objector of sort. The inquisition panel found out my objection was not "real" so I ended up as Army Radio Man. But I learned to morse very badly, probably because of mild dyslexia. So rest of the year I was making test equipment for a Russian Missile Control because of language skills ( https://flic.kr/p/JycyMy ). And just occasionally consulting the "Kyber"-team. I did not get any medals or ranks for my contribution, because untrustworthy Hippie with bad hairdo. Also I was rejected from army reserve duties, which was very good.

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

#102

Post by pjmlp »

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

As long time follower from Niklaus Wirth work, Oberon is more capable than Pascal, only if you are speaking about the original edition of Pascal in the mid-70's.

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

#103

Post by vram22 »

webmobdev wrote: post #97
anta40 wrote: post #17

Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming. MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C for programming competitions. Already had some experiences with Basic, and found C to be too "low level" for my taste, I picked Pascal. Next year, I jumped into Delphi: learning Win32 GUI basics and some database programming with MySQL. Probably pretty advance…

Thanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.) We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C…

May be obvious to some, but the braces can be replaced by BEGIN and END keywords by multiple methods, including careful editor search and replace, or use of a preprocessor before compiling (may not handle tokens in strings or comments), or maybe the best option, by hotkey mappings, like BEGIN to some key combo, and END to another.

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

#104

Post by froh »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60
pjmlp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. Long answer, UNIX spread like fire, because Bell Labs/AT&T initially weren't allowed to sell it. So the code was given to university, and while they needed to pay for a UNIX license to use it, the price was symbolic versus paying for something like VMS. Which naturally made UNIX the number one choice for the startups trying to get into the Workstation market during the 90's. So C star…

> Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. On Unix mass adoption... My best friend (and still best friend to this day) in the early 90s had an SGI Indy at home (his stepfather happened to be the director of SGI Benelux) and so I got to play with one of the earliest SGI Indy. What a machine to have, for teenagers into computing, at home in the early nineties! The shock, the world of difference between a beige box running MS-D…

Well, Turbo Pascal was simply not available on Linux, at least not "freely". I loved Turbo, and I missed it and I begrudgingly switched to C++. And as a side note, I hated g++ cygnus to the bones, because they had some fixes for c++ templates that were not yet released in the foss version, only in the "pro" release.

Oh how I missed Turbo for Linux...

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

#105

Post by webmobdev »

vram22 wrote: post #103
webmobdev wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.) We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C…

May be obvious to some, but the braces can be replaced by BEGIN and END keywords by multiple methods, including careful editor search and replace, or use of a preprocessor before compiling (may not handle tokens in strings or comments), or maybe the best option, by hotkey mappings, like BEGIN to some key combo, and END to another.

Oh yeah, I do know that with modern editors it's not such a chore anymore. I just mentioned that as an example of verbosity that slightly annoys me. (The same with Ada too, which I understand also draws inspiration from Pascal).

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

#106

Post by fb03 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #45

My first computer was an old PC XT, ancient even by the undemanding standards of 1995, but cost under 100 USD - which counted a lot in early post-Communist Central Europe with average wage in the 250 USD territory. I did a lot of Turbo Pascaling on that one, but it was frustrating watching the compiler go so slooowly while I already noticed a misprint or a missing ; on the screen. The last thing I did on Turbo Pascal…

It was so easy to draw simple graphics in pascal, right?

I have this snippet burned in my head and I used it all the time in MS-DOS' on Turbo Pascal 6 or 7 to get to the tasty 320x200 palleted graphics mode:

    asm
      mov ax,13h
      int 10h
    end
iirc, after that you could simply directly access video memory using something like "mem[$A000:x+200*y] = color;" and that was it.

Fun times.

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

#107

Post by mikewarot »

My first real project in Turbo Pascal was a system to record the inspection of Fire Protection Equipment in Coal Fired Generating Stations (where small fires break out all the time due to the coal dust everywhere).

I wrote a set of routines to allow field based text editing, and built up a CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) database of locations, routes, equipment. I took 4 weeks instead of the two I estimated.

The customer loved it, it met all the requirements... and was totally impractical as a system. I spent the next year rewriting it in a fairly agile manner working for the Russ, Assistant Plant Manager. He taught me how to make user friendly software in a simple manner... we would pull a person from the plant and say something like

"This is Mike... he wrote this program. [Worker Name], I don't expect you to be a computer expert, it's not your job... I want you to do X,Y and Z... If something goes wrong, it's Mike's fault"

"Press F1 for Help" was ALWAYS at the top of the screen after the first 5 seconds of the first user trying things and not knowing what to do. I learned an amazing amount about writing software from Russ.

One time... he asked "what would happen if I disconnected it right now?" I didn't know, and said so.... I got that taken care of in the next week. You could disconnect at any time, and never lose a record.

It was a fun job.

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

#108

Post by pjmlp »

froh wrote: post #104
TacticalCoder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. On Unix mass adoption... My best friend (and still best friend to this day) in the early 90s had an SGI Indy at home (his stepfather happened to be the director of SGI Benelux) and so I got to play with one of the earliest SGI Indy. What a machine to have, for teenagers into computing, at home in the early nineties! The shock, the world of difference between a beige box running MS-D…

Well, Turbo Pascal was simply not available on Linux, at least not "freely". I loved Turbo, and I missed it and I begrudgingly switched to C++. And as a side note, I hated g++ cygnus to the bones, because they had some fixes for c++ templates that were not yet released in the foss version, only in the "pro" release. Oh how I missed Turbo for Linux...

Yes, that one of the triggers for me to eventually go into C++ as my next "to go language", I saw C the same way that Bjarne felt about BCPL when forced to leave Simula behind.

Interesting paying for cygnus stuff on Windows never occurred to me, I rather spent my money with Borland and Microsoft compilers.

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

#109

Post by augustk »

c-cube wrote: post #81
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

In what ways is it more capable than Pascal? At first glance Pascal seemed to have more features (including discriminated unions)?

To name a few, Oberon has extensible types which enables object oriented programming (and makes discriminated unions superfluous). It supports modular programming. It also has so called open arrays which allows passing arrays of any length to a procedure.

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

#110

Post by augustk »

pjmlp wrote: post #102
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

As long time follower from Niklaus Wirth work, Oberon is more capable than Pascal, only if you are speaking about the original edition of Pascal in the mid-70's.

Yes, what I have in mind are the languages designed by Niklaus Wirth. What's fascinating about Oberon is how small and clean it is compared to equally capable languages.
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