That's a blast from the past. Turbo Pascal 3 was the first "real" language that I learned when I was young. And then there was 5.5, which had a much nicer IDE. Ah the good old days.
Turbo Pascal Turns 40
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Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#72I had something called Turbo Pascal DiskTutor which if I remember correctly really helped me understand object oriented programming.
I also spent quite a lot of time working on a type of rough wireframe 3d CAD editor in regular Turbo Pascal when I was in the 8th grade. I used equations I got from a little reference book my dad had brought from some garage sale or whatever to figure out how to do rotations and perspective.
We also used it in AP computer science class which was probably the highlight of high school for me.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#73Turbo Pascal was a game changer. Prior to this, I'd been learning to code with Computer Innovations C compiler. It required multiple compiler passes involving swapping floppy disks. What a pain. Turbo Pascal was small, compiled fast and produced tiny executables. It was a joy to use. Later, I used Delphi to develop the GUI for an electron microscope. It made GUI development so easy - even developing custom controls for knobs and 2-D sliders.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#74That's a blast from the past. Turbo Pascal 3 was the first "real" language that I learned when I was young. And then there was 5.5, which had a much nicer IDE. Ah the good old days.
same here!
put together a sieve of eratosthenes from algorithm as a kid and thought I was hot shit. something about watching a computer slowly tick through primes was so satisfying.
good times.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#75A fantastically productive system back in the day. It was a joy to use.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#76It's hard to overstate just how much faster Turbo Pascal was than its competitors. So fast that it was hard to believe it wasn't cheating in some way. And then the resulting program was faster too.
A tour-de-force of its day, and it deserved all the acclimation that it got.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#77see also, "things that turbo pascal is smaller than" by james hague: https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
> "The entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable--the compiler and IDE--was 39,731 bytes"
On my computer now, it's smaller than:
- License.txt which comes with "TurboPascal (with DOSBox)" (42,044 bytes)
- sqlanywhere.vim, syntax highlighting file for the SQL dialect of SQL Anywhere (41,929 bytes)
- parse.py, the URL parser in Python's urllib (42,057 bytes)
- doc_testing.html the Rust By Example section on writing tests in comments (42,059 bytes)
- pwd.exe (print working directory) in GitHub Desktop (42,296 bytes)
- WindowsExplorer.admx the XML policy file describing the available
settings in Windows Explorer (42,461 bytes)Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#78I 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.…
Ha, thanks for refreshing my memory that it was 5.5 that added OOP!
I started with 4.0, so that's my baseline. Then 5.0 added overlays (IIRC) and 6.0 introduced Turbo Vision, which was a kind of magic to me :).
It's interesting how a _programming language/IDE_ can bring such warm feelings.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#79Fun fact: the original author of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, went on to lead development of C# and then later TypeScript.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was completely written in assembly
hand written and also optimized for throughput right ? maybe pascal syntax was also parsing friendly.. i don't recall one thing for sure is that it felt near instant if not real time building small projects, to the point that 14yo me was completely unaware of meaning of Compile until years later.
What bear8642 says. I worked with Anders and interviewed the poor man about it！