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Turbo Pascal Turns 40

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#181

Post by pasc1878 »

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…

No it is because people don:t write documentation any more.

New languages tend to be open source and the ethos is read the source. Which I think is wrong.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#182

Post by ivan_gammel »

benj111 wrote: post #174
ivan_gammel wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 every…

Most programs written in Pascal were UI programs (even in client-server model client was typically a specialized program, not browser), so rendering a string would indeed require a font file. You could pre-render and cache in RAM some frequently used glyphs (locale-specific alphabet, digits etc), but hitting HDD every time to render an emoji won’t be fast enough. Modern Unicode was simply not feasible.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#183

Post by dugmartin »

I started with TP 3 in high school in the late 80s and then went on to use it my freshman year in college as all our Intro to CS projects were in Pascal. I think 98% of the folks in that class used the mainframe, which involved submitting your job in the terminal and then walking across campus to the printing room and seeing the output. I did all my work in my dorm on my Tandy 1000 SX and when I was done was able to use a pirated copy of an IBM file uploader to get it into my mainframe account and then submit it. Luckily TP 3 still understood old style Pascal comment delimiters as we were graded as much on our comments as we were on working code.

A couple of years later as a senior I used TP 3 using "Turbo Vision" to write a simple learning focused stats package for a professor's book (_Quality Control, 4th Edition_). I found out later that same package was being used for the production line of Jim Beam whiskey.

I also wrote a few shareware programs in TP and put them on Simtel in the early 90s. It was pretty cool getting random checks in the mail for utilities like "vgalogin", a Novell login frontend in VGA mode with a floating message of the day.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#184

Post by pantulis »

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…

> Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming.

And not only top-down procedural programming as was the norm for Pascal in those days, the Breakout demo was a lesson in OOP.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#186

Post by cxr »

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.

You're saying that the reason for the slow compilation speed we see here is a commitment to keeping the compiler fast. That's not a logical sequence of thought.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#187

Post by zozbot234 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #182
benj111 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 every…

Most programs written in Pascal were UI programs (even in client-server model client was typically a specialized program, not browser), so rendering a string would indeed require a font file. You could pre-render and cache in RAM some frequently used glyphs (locale-specific alphabet, digits etc), but hitting HDD every time to render an emoji won’t be fast enough. Modern Unicode was simply not feasible.

HDD and memory sizes were growing very fast back then. So it would've been feasible even on fairly low-end hardware, starting from the mid-1990s or so. If you could have "multimedia" or "DTP" software on such PC's, modern fonts ought to have been possible. The flip side is that old computers became obsolete very quickly back then, a few years were enough for very real generational changes.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#188

Post by thsksbd »

deepspace wrote: post #127
thsksbd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 pi…

I was joking. I think IP laws are broken anyway, so I really dont care.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#189

Post by CRConrad »

benj111 wrote: post #171
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.

~20. The Euro (or "Teuro", as it was often called in Germany at the time) was introduced in... Uh, 2000 or 2001, thereabouts.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#190

Post by chiph »

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.

In my college graphics class (taught by Jack Bresenham, no less) I asked for permission to use the new Borland Turbo C for my class projects. After a quick recompile for the demo (the PC in the classroom wasn't a 80286) I found my code ran a third of the speed of everyone else's, which had been written in Turbo Pascal v4.

And that's how I learned that mature compilers are better than 1.0 release compilers.

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