51–60 of 271 posts
Wow I wrote a lot of Pascal when I was a kid. I then did a bit of C but didn't like it much, and moved onto Delphi. It hadn't occurred to me that Pascal is actually younger than me, though not by much.
Turbo Pascal was the first "real" programming language I learned past 6809E ASM, structured basic flavors and batch/shell back in the very late 80s. When I went to college for CS in the early 90s, they were still teaching the first year of classes in Borland Pascal so that turned out to be very useful experience. A few years later, my Pascal background sailed me into a half-decade stint as a custom app dev working wi…
Ran it on my Apple ][. It was interesting because another great platform on the Apple was UCSD Pascal but Turbo was so much slicker and easier to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
..though you may have been able to run it with the Z-80 Softcard
Editor, compiler, debugger (separate full-screen output buffer alt-f5 iirc), graphics.
And oh complete stdlib docs that worked offline and in-app so you didn’t get out of “flow”. With copy-pastable examples in the help.
In a few MB.
Ran it on my Apple ][. It was interesting because another great platform on the Apple was UCSD Pascal but Turbo was so much slicker and easier to use.
I don't think there was a version of Turbo Pascal for the Apple ][ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal ..though you may have been able to run it with the Z-80 Softcard
My first exposure to TP was when I pirated it off a warez BBS in the winter of 93 at the age of 14. The raw power I felt when I compiled my own EXE in contrast to running just a .BAS file was enthralling! I started modding Renegade BBS and writing door programs. I tried to, unsuccessfully, create worms, Trojans and viruses. It changed my life and set me on a course for where I am in tech today. Moreover I’m reformed…
Free Pascal still has a look-a-like of the original TP IDE! But that code is bitrotting by their own admission (it still relies extensively on obsolete quirks of the original MS-DOS platform) and it's sad that we don't have a look-a-like version that can work as a general editor in the terminal (like neovim or emacs) and integrate with modern IDE-oriented facilities like the LSP, tree-sitter parsers or the debug adap…