Perl at 35 (almost 36)
> How do you do, fellow kids?
Turbo Pascal Turns 40
61–70 of 271 posts
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#62I did learn it in school when I was about 14, 15. My daughter is 8 and she'll learn some programming this third year in school but I bet it won't be TP. I didn't teach her any programming on purpose, but if she likes it we'll do a game in Godot.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#63Stirs memories of Clipper
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#64I was incredibly lucky that my college way back in 1987 gave all engineering students a PC XT loaded with things like Turbo Pascal. So much better than being stuck on a time sharing system in a lab…
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#65When I was a kid, a kindly computer store owner (who also made me a great deal on an PC-semi-compatible running MS-DOS 1.25, for approx. a hundred lawns mowed and babies sat) sold me a copy of Turbo Pascal for generic MS-DOS (no PC BIOS assumed) on 8" floppy. He transferred it to the 160KB 5.25" format that my semi-compatible used. I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, as I am now. That helped bootstrap my ca…
Okay, I'll bite :) What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?
That was the version of DOS that the Columbia MPC ran, and it was almost 100% compatible. I ran some code based on articles about the video card, and it couldn’t do the 160x100 mode that people wrote about.
So a lot of “clones” may have been this close as the Columbia was.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#66I transitioned from Apple Pascal (based on UCSC p-system Pascal) on the Apple ][+ amd //e to Turbo Pascal on DOS in the early 80s. Turbo Pascal was a blast: the very quick compiler, good feedback, colorful editor, and use of the Wordstar keybindings, which I already knew, made for a great experience.
I recall writing programs large enough to require use of the overlay facility, which essentially let you page in different parts of your program under DOS.
I also recall meeting David Intersimone, a great ambassador of Borland, sometime in the 80s - might have been later 80s - when he visited my university as a guest of the local ACM chapter.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#67I started with TP 5.5...
My uni had two micros halls, one with 5.0, the other with 5.5. What's the difference? I asked. It turns out the 5.5 had some new shit called "Object Oriented Programming"... and a Breakout clone to illustrate the paradigm.
At some moment Borland released, free as in beer, the 3 and 5 versions. Binaries should be out there somewhere for those curious.
I'm sure young people would be surprised to see what 5.5 provided. The on-screen help was amazing: cut and paste useful examples from the help of many functions. And the instantaneous compiling... :)
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#68One of my favourite computer games was written in Turbo Pascal: ZZT, written by Tim Sweeney of Epic Megagames. It was a quircky text-mode game with puzzles, shooting, and so on. It had a built-in game editor that came even with the free shareware version, and it even had a little programming language called ZZT-OOP.
ZZT's original source code was lost. Years later, Adrian Siekierka painstakingly reverse-engineered the original Pascal code till -- when compiled with the original version of Turbo Pascal -- produced a byte-for-byte identical executable. Amazing! Read more:
- https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#69This brings memories.. I remember running Turbo Pascal 4.0 under PC-Ditto (XT emulator) on Atari 520ST :-)). It all looked mysterious and raw comparing to GEM [1], but it was probably my first _serious_ programming setup.
The Atari was from Germany, and I didn't know German at all, but I knew a bit of English. And so probably that was an important factor in why it was more attractive than whatever Basic or Assembler I had on the host system.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#70Fond memories of watching my dad sat in front of a bright blue screen covered in inscrutable glyphs. It looked like pure wizardry to me then.
While the original colours are too intense for my taste, I do sometimes switch to the Noctis Azureus theme in VS Code when I find myself thinking of him.