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Turbo Pascal Turns 40

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#201

Post by CRConrad »

darkteflon wrote: post #70

Fond memories of watching my dad sat in front of a bright blue screen covered in inscrutable glyphs. It looked like pure wizardry to me then. While the original colours are too intense for my taste, I do sometimes switch to the Noctis Azureus theme in VS Code when I find myself thinking of him.

The colour scheme I recall was yellow on black. Version two, I think, but I'm not sure... I copied a copy I found -- no doubt already pirated by whoever left it there -- in the Economics computer lab onto a floppy ("crunchy", actually; a 3.5" diskette) back in ~1990-91. And then went on to implement a multi-variable linear regression algorihtm for my exam paper in statistics in it.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#202

Post by CRConrad »

kasajian wrote: post #107

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

Looks about like what I recall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38486499

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#203

Post by benj111 »

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.

If you use an emoji load it into ram then. You aren't (generally) going to be using Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, ancient Egyptian and emoji all in one document on one screen. If you're using Japanese load the Japanese font, if Chinese, use the Chinese font.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#205

Post by swah »

While SWAG seems to be a group (https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/9596219) I remember this executable "swag.exe" that ran inside Turbo Pascal and had tens of demos of this (for me, then) advanced coding environment, even with graphics demos.

Pressing F9 would compile and run the selected "demo" super easily.

One of my earliest memories of using a computer, I think.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#206

Post by benj111 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #199
zozbot234 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Low-end hardware in 1995 was something like i386 with 1 Mb RAM, meaning that just a modern Unicode font would consume most of the memory available to a program, probably leaving no enough space for the rendering code (which is not small by standards of that time). In 2nd half of 1990s I still maintained a classroom with 15 IBM PC XTs, which were still doing their jobs (our most modern hardware were Pentiums with 16 M…

>modern Unicode font

That isn't unicode though. That's a font. You can have bitmap unicode fonts if you want.

Let's put it this way. Say you have a unicode aware library and only ever use the ASCII compatible codes. You aren't using more space for fonts.

If you want to read a Chinese document, yes you would need to then install Chinese fonts. That would take space yes. But it's possible. If you only speak Chinese that's something you have to deal with.

Could you have a font for every unicode point at the same time, probably not, but most people don't need to read most code points most of the time.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#207

Post by scrumper »

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…

One of mine too, a really special bit of software. It was my real introduction to programming too. I'd typed in BASIC listings from magazines and done dumb stuff on the school BBC Micros before, but ZZT-OOP on my first PC was where I learned to make things I wanted from scratch.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#208

Post by cvak »

_glass wrote: post #172
ReleaseCandidat wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

probably core ABAP development in some module.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#209

Post by dist1ll »

fm77 wrote: post #194

For all who wonder why Turbo Pascal was so fast here some insights: 50% is certainly due to the language Pascal itself. Niklaus Wirth designed the language in a way so it can be compiled in a single pass. In general the design of Pascal is in my opinion truly elegant and compared to other programming languages completely underrated. Wirth published a tiny version of his compiler written in Pascal itself in a 1976 boo…

All of this is fascinating. I believe single-pass compilation is underrated, and quickly disregarded by a large body of the PL community as anachronistic. I think that's complete nonsense. Just take one look at the massive build infrastructure that's driving modern monorepos to see how incredibly crucial fast compile-times are.

> Jump tables everywhere. In general the compiler was quite table driven.

It would be interesting to see how this approach fares in the face of modern branch prediction on modern CPUs.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#210

Post by trealira »

CRConrad wrote: post #200
trealira wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langu…

Yeah, the benefits of strong typing have nothing to do with Pascal... Sigh. Kids nowadays, etc. Look up which was the original language ridiculed for its "belt-and-braces" approach to type safety, in contrast to C, the freewheeling language of Kewl H4xx0rs (although they weren't yet spelled that way). Now excuse me, there's a cloud I have to go shake my fist at.

I genuinely didn't realize Pascal was recognized as providing having a strong type system. I guess there is Brian Kernighan's "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language," where he complains that there's "no escape" to the type system as in C, where anything can be cast to anything. But I took it to mean that C just had an exceptionally loose and liberal type system.
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