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Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

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Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#3

Post by msravi »

Brings back fond memories. Used to use the "debug" program that came with DOS to play with assembly as a student, because TASM (Borland) and MASM (Microsoft) cost money, but doing that gave one a real feel for assembly. Coding a short JMP instruction, for example, requires a relative address from the current instruction PC, so you had to hand compute that and code it in. And if you added instructions between the JMP and the target, then you had to go back and change it.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#4

Post by jstgord »

Borland manuals were a pure delight..

as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system.

I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine really worked.

Was so happy when I could afford Turbo Pascal back in the day. best product ever.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#6

Post by varjag »

limmeau wrote: post #5

In page 44 onwards, this describes how to do class-based OOP with assembly language extensions to generate vtable calls. I wonder who ever used that…

We used it for the kicks at the Uni. Never got to try that in prod because frankly the next time it came to using assembler it was 15 years later (and on another arch).

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#7

Post by pfoof »

>Most people think of assembly language as a low-level language. Turbo Assembler, however, provides many of the features of a high-level language (such as abstract data types, and easy interfacing to other languages). The addition of object-oriented data structures gives Turbo Assembler the power to create object-oriented programs as easily as high-level languages while retaining- the speed and flexibility of assembly language.

Shocking and surprising

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#8

Post by 1letterunixname »

Borland C++ 3.1 was the epitome of documentation. The retail packaging was about the width of 7 pieces of big box software and it weighed quite a bit more from the "encyclopedia set" it included. The assembler quick reference guide for TASM was better in 3.1 than in either 4 or 5. It was also spiral bound with a white comb. Although updated with features, 4 and 5 reduced the amount of documentation significantly.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#9

Post by aforwardslash »

limmeau wrote: post #5

In page 44 onwards, this describes how to do class-based OOP with assembly language extensions to generate vtable calls. I wonder who ever used that…

When I was a teen, I used TA precisely because of oop support :) it was a bit cumberstone compared to higher level languages, but worked quite well for the kind of stuff I needed (mostly display-related and IO libraries)
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