Turbo Pascal Turns 40 • Hacker News Board

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#111

Post by kant2002 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:45 AM UTC

qznc wrote: post #16

rezaprima wrote: post #6

25 seconds to compile it? How come ?

Niklaus Wirth (Pascal inventor) had the rule that compiler speed must never regress. So if you add an optimization (which means the compiler has to do more work), the optimization must "pay for itself" and make the compiler faster. That philosophy probably seeped into Turbo Pascal to some degree.

That’s very interesting. I see similar attitude in the C# JIT/Roslyn developers where they take this very seriously. Interesting are this is influenced by Anders, or just whole thing tick for a lot of compiler developers?

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#112

Post by GiorgioG » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

I still have my original Turbo Pascal 7.0 floppy install disks from high school in the early/mid 90s. There was no Googling or ChatGPT'ing for help when you got stuck...I feel like it made me a better thinking programmer back then and that somehow I've lost something with all the answers only one query/chat away.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#113

Post by zzo38computer » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:53 AM UTC

benhoyt wrote: post #68

One 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 th…

ZZT is the reason I have Turbo Pascal on my computer.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#114

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:54 AM UTC

looking at the perfection of Turbo pascal always made me feel stupid. At least it's not just me, wikipedia says:

"Scott MacGregor of Microsoft said that Bill Gates "couldn't understand why our stuff was so slow" compared to Turbo Pascal. "He would bring in poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at him for half an hour" because their company was unable to defeat Kahn's small startup, MacGregor recalled.[21] " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#115

Post by doubloon » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 2:57 AM UTC

The main thing I recall about TP was that it came with simple, easy to understand code examples for every function that were organized logically and easy to find and use. So as a teenager who barely understood basic I could teach myself TP without the internet, just using the IDE.

So many modern systems do not have anything even close to this. I wonder if its inherent in the nature of the simpler x86 DOS based systems of the time, where its simply impossible with modern pace of change, cross-platform needs, and complexity to have something like that.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#116

Post by figital » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:04 AM UTC

Still have the manuals at home on my bookshelf. Great examples of technical writing and explaining how the world is changing.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#117

Post by zzo38computer » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:06 AM UTC

I tried to view the article. First, I got a certificate error. I tried again, and I got a proxy error. I tried again, and then I got a "WebCommand Error". So, then I tried again, and this time the connection timed out.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#118

Post by vanderZwan » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:13 AM UTC

doubloon wrote: post #115

The main thing I recall about TP was that it came with simple, easy to understand code examples for every function that were organized logically and easy to find and use. So as a teenager who barely understood basic I could teach myself TP without the internet, just using the IDE. So many modern systems do not have anything even close to this. I wonder if its inherent in the nature of the simpler x86 DOS based system…

Processing (P5) had this: you can select any string of text in its IDE anl search for it in the docs, and if it's one of the built-in functions or constants it will open the associated static html page that came installed with the software, so no internet nor server required. And despite being offline you can still navigate the docs too. This feels a lost basic skill in static site generation these days.

It was the only creative coding framework that had complete, offline documentation like that at the time I might add. OpenFrameworks is still mostly autogenerated stubs for example.

IMO it was one of the things that gave Processing an edge in educational contexts over all alternatives. I was pretty sad to see p5.js not fully continue that tradition and require that you go online to read the docs, and that it's not a static website but that text is rendered with javascript when you open it (still complete and with examples though).

https://processing.org/

https://p5js.org/

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#119

Post by vanderZwan » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:14 AM UTC

benhoyt wrote: post #68

One 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 th…

ZZT also inspired the overworld of Frog Fractions 2

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#120

Post by sltkr » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 3:15 AM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #117

I tried to view the article. First, I got a certificate error. I tried again, and I got a proxy error. I tried again, and then I got a "WebCommand Error". So, then I tried again, and this time the connection timed out.

I can't get the site to load either. It's probably overloaded.

Archive.org has a copy though: https://web.archive.org/web/20231201001803/https://blog.marc...

Not that there is a lot of content on that page beyond the title.