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Turbo Pascal Turns 40

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#171

Post by benj111 »

hankman86 wrote: post #151

Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…

Its about 2 marks to the euro apparently.

For anyone not up to date with ~30 year old exchange rates.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#172

Post by _glass »

ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #162
hankman86 wrote: post #151

Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…

> fully-featured GUI program when today similarly powerful software is orders of magnitude larger in size? That's because the "fully featured" of the 90s would be barely usable today. Or to rephrase: the frameworks and programs of today are not "similarly powerful" to the ones from the mid 90s, even if you just recompiled the app from 25 years ago with the current version of your framework (theoretically ;), it would…

Depends on what you mean for SAP. Reports at least are super easy to write and have better usability than other in-house stuff I saw. UI5 now has components that you can use with React, which give the web experience. SAP GUI is kind of okay, and fast. What do you mean?

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#173

Post by ZiggerZZ »

Turbo Pascal was my first programming language! I think I was 10 or 11 y.o. when my school teacher introduced us to it. I still like its simplicity, Python (my main language now) reminds me of it.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#174

Post by benj111 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #155
hankman86 wrote: post #151

Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…

There was at least one elephant missing in that executable - Unicode support. It would not fit into PC RAM back then probably.

Unicode support is cheap memory wise. The expensive thing if having the fonts. The fonts can live on the hard drive until actually needed.

I suspect the issue is more of the runtime overhead of supporting it over the entire stack. That's a bigger cost that people would only want to pay if they were actually going to use it. So then you're in the situation of having to support unicode and non unicode versions of everything.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#175

Post by acqq »

hankman86 wrote: post #151

Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…

Changing the code and seeing the results was even on the machines of that time practically immediate with the first versions of the Turbo Pascal, as long as the program and the source were able to fit in the RAM. And the interaction was designed to be immediate too. If I remember correctly the compilation error didn't cause infinite screens of report, it just repositioned me to the line where the error was. If the cause was a typo, I was able to edit recompile and run in a second. Most more recent tools have other ideas, requiring more unnecessary activities from a developer.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#176

Post by imjonse »

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.

Indeed, Ctrl-F9 in Turbo Pascal was almost instantaneous, whereas the same in Turbo C++ would let you read through the list of files in the popup window as they were processed.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#177

Post by jdhzzz »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #39
neilv wrote: post #10

When 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?

Not the OP but in my case it was a Sanyo with 2 floppies.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#178

Post by magicalhippo »

robocat wrote: post #136
Keyframe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Delphi, where at least he tried to do something with strings hah. Never got used to them, and never really liked Wirth languages, but respect is due of course.

Delphi strings were really well implemented. Garbage collected (RC), multithread safe, length in first integer, fast, make them as big as your memory could handle. Reduced bad memory pointers a lot compared to competition at the time. Didn't handle the Unicode transition well: but virtually no languages did.

On the contrary, I'd say they handled the Unicode transition very well.

At work we had many, many thousands of lines manipulating strings, high and low level, and full project was over 300kLOC plus many heavy dependencies. We spent just a day or two to convert it to be Unicode capable.

Since we've had hardly any issues, and Unicode is not something we need to think about in the day-to-day.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#179

Post by jdhzzz »

neilv wrote: post #82
CoastalCoder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll bite :) What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?

Sanyo MBC-550 series. It later got MS-DOS 2.11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBC-550

Missed this and commented separately. Thanks for reminding me of the model. This was my upgrade to the TI 99/4 I drove across the state of CT to spend 995 1980-ish dollars on.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#180

Post by pasc1878 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #155
hankman86 wrote: post #151

Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…

There was at least one elephant missing in that executable - Unicode support. It would not fit into PC RAM back then probably.

Yes because Unicode did not exist at the time
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