Turbo Pascal Turns 40 • Hacker News Board

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#101

Post by sriku » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:02 AM UTC

My first "big" program was a school project submission done in TP. It had an editor for drawing pixels in a (text) grid .. one line at a time. You could draw polygons, name them and the next time you drew something similar to the earlier ones it would recognise it and suggest the same name. If it couldn't find one, it would ask you for a name to remember.

Was so much fun writing it. The interface was fun to write. You could use it to tell apart isosceles triangles from equilateral triangles, for example.

The machine I used only had two floppy drives and still I recall TP was fast as a Ferrari.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#102

Post by JKCalhoun » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

Weirdly, Turbo Pascal was my first high-level programming language and it was on my Macintosh Plus. (I have come to find Turbo Pascal was more of a PC thing.)

In college I used a student loan to buy my first Apple computer, the Macintosh Plus. By chance there was a classified ad in the college newspaper for a copy of Turbo Pascal for the Mac — some professor was selling it for like $40 or something. I snagged it.

It had the manual, thankfully, but very simply tools for Macintosh development. No ResEdit, but the odd R-Maker app that expected you to create a Macintosh resource as a text file and then run it through the tool to create the resource fork.

My first few apps were Turbo Pascal implementations of algorithms from the Computer Recreations column of Scientific American (thankfully requiring little UI — a window and a few buttons typically).

Later I would learn of and move on to THINK Pascal — a much more Mac-centric IDE. Later still I would take the leap to THINK C....

But I will always look back on Turbo Pascal and remember it with fondness. It was a time when I was entering a wild new world and Turbo Pascal was there to hold the door open for me.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#103

Post by beej71 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:10 AM UTC

This compiler was blazingly fast in the 80s. Running on a modern computer, builds should look instantaneous--has anyone tried it?

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#104

Post by aunwick » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:11 AM UTC

Nice that you had an ide. I got demoted for having 99.9 percentile SAT score in 7th grade and had only an Atari1040 ST to prove my mettle on.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#105

Post by jasomill » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:13 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #77

5- wrote: post #59

see 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 i…

Also smaller than half the binaries in /usr/bin on my x86_64 Fedora 39 system[1] and less than half the size of every binary executable in /bin and /usr/bin on my x86_64 Mac[2] in spite of the fact that all the Linux and Mac binaries are dynamically linked to at least libc / libSystem.

It's also less than half the size of Xcode's PNG-compressed Retina application icon (83,056 bytes).

[1] This includes such gems as cat (40,848 bytes), tac (40,808 bytes), and tee (40,968 bytes).

[2] Where even /usr/bin/true weighs in at an astonishing 100,512 bytes, despite its entire text section disassembling to

    pushq %rbp
    movq %rsp, %rbp
    xorl %eax, %eax
    popq %rbp
    retq

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#106

Post by orionblastar » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:16 AM UTC

NikkiA wrote: post #26

orionblastar wrote: post #2

I started with TP 3.0 in high school. It compiled faster than any other Pascal. It uses the WordStar editor. My teacher called it the cat's pajamas.

TP 2.x and 3.x had integrated editors that were functionally similar(inspired by) to WordStar, but were not wordstar, and using an external editor was a pain in the ass.

I mean to say it used WordStar commands. It was an early IDE and worth the money to switch from MGA to CGA to see the color highlights.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#107

Post by kasajian » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:24 AM UTC

Is anyone going to mentioned that that's not at all what Turbo Pascal looked like when it was first released? Not in 1983. The UI was significantly simpler.

I remember it looking like this: https://imgur.com/EuOVL8c

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#108

Post by corysama » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:26 AM UTC

compiler-guy wrote: post #76

It'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.

https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#109

Post by binarycrusader » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:27 AM UTC

For those looking for a retrocomputing Pascal; use Turbo Rascal Syntax Error: https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu...

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#110

Post by corysama » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:29 AM UTC

5- wrote: post #59

see also, "things that turbo pascal is smaller than" by james hague: https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

Also an rant on how it was so fast https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html