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Turbo Pascal Turns 40
121–130 of 271 posts
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#122I started with Turbo Pascal, and as is often noted by others, I spent a lot of time with the book Borland shipped with the compiler.
Turbo Pascal was my first real programming language (after BASIC and a bit of 8086 assembly) in my pre-teen years, and I read the manual very thoroughly. It was fascinating to learn, even though much of it was over my head.
I remember sitting at the living room table on many evenings, studying a stack of printed out source code. My task was to contribute to translating a bulletin board system called WWIV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWIV
I went on to study Turbo C, which came with a wonderfully informative manual also. That experience formed the foundation of my programming in the next decades (2~3).
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#123My 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…
"I owe Borland a lot."
A belated license to be exact :P
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#124It'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.
Even until today, Pascal is still mentioned as language than can be compiled fast (including Go vs Rust debate).
Many years ago, I remember building FPC 2.0 something on a Windows PC (512 MB RAM) and it took no more than 5 minutes.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#125Is 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
That's what I remember too.
I briefly documented how to run Turbo Pascal 3.00A on a CP/M system a while back:
https://github.com/skx/z80-playground-cpm-fat/blob/main/TURB...
I'm doing that on a single-board Z80-based system, and it has to be said that writing pascal is a pleasure on such a machine. 64k of memory, and yet code compiles to real executables "instantly".
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#126I started with Turbo Pascal, and as is often noted by others, I spent a lot of time with the book Borland shipped with the compiler.
And Jeff Duntemann's outstanding "Complete Turbo Pascal".
By the way, the x86-64/AMD64 Linux edition of his assembly-language text just came out:
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#127My 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…
"I owe Borland a lot." A belated license to be exact :P
I pirated Turbo Pascal back in the day because I was a poor student in a Third World country and there was no way I could afford it. Ditto Turbo C.
After I started working, I had a hand in selecting Borland C++ as our in-house development platform, and we paid Borland a fortune in licensing fees. Which would have gone to Intel or another company if it were not for my, and other folks in my cohort's experience with pirated Borland products as students.
There is a lesson in there, somewhere.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#128In high school I thought "structured programming" would cramp my style. I'd spend hours with BASICA printouts spread out over the floor, tracing through chains of GOTOs to find my bugs. One day my dad brought home Turbo Pascal so I gave it a shot. I wrote Conway's Game of Life, and was shocked when it ran correctly the first time. Never wrote another line of BASICA. Much later I turned pro and moved on to other langu…
> was shocked when it ran correctly the first time This overall "if it compiles it works" philosophy is quite common among Pascal-family languages, and derived languages like Ada. Though there is also PL/I if you want a language with a loosely Pascalish syntax that relies on the complete opposite design style - the one that was carried over to C and its derivatives.
I doubt that by modern standards, Pascal seems to work if it compiles, compared to languages like Java or Go. They were comparing it to writing spaghetti code with GOTOs everywhere in BASICA, so no wonder their code seemed more reliable. Nowadays, the jump in reliability comes from strong and helpful type systems, not structured programming. Ada still seems good there, but Pascal is just an ordinary programming language.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#129I first used Turbo Pascal in a high school programming class. I remember our teacher saying: "Make it work first, then you can make it look pretty."
It's being used to this day (or until very recently, at least) in some countries, generally running under dosbox because DOS software can no longer run natively in modern PC OS's.
FreeDOS exists.. https://freedos.org/
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#130I swear I thought I read "Pedro Pascal Turns 40" and thought why would anyone here care about that lol