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Turbo Pascal Turns 40

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#221

Post by zozbot234 »

dist1ll wrote: post #219
zozbot234 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single-pass is a bit of a gimmick. It requires programs to be written sequentially in a strictly "bottom up" way, so that forward references to parts of the program that have yet to be defined are rare enough that they can be marked specially (e.g. as with C program headers). It's also largely irrelevant if you want optimized code generation, especially across multiple procedures, since that requires you to read abst…

How often do you need highly optimized cg during development? Unless I'm working on games, 99.9% of my time (even on highly performance-critical software) is spent on evaluating debug builds with 0 perf requirements - because I need to implement it correctly first, and make sure tests are passing. I think it's uncontroversial that most fast, statically compiled languages benefit greatly from quick debug builds. It's…

I think I have made the argument above that the feasibility of single-pass code gen boils down to how the program is structured, not so much the language design itself. Perhaps current compilers should be reworked to generate code about as quickly as TP did, if optimizations are totally disabled and the code is written to eschew unresolved forward references. But I'm not sure there would be much of a point. And you would still have many language features where going back and performing a second pass over what was previously parsed (and perhaps codegen'd) just can't be avoided.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#222

Post by Narishma »

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

It looked like that until version 4 where they switched to the more common interface with windows, menus and whatnot.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#223

Post by waynecochran »

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.

Extended ASCII was the way forward then.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#224

Post by Qem »

The first ever programming environment I ever had contact with. The awesome feeling of compiling your own programs and bending the computer to your will. Fond memories.

Thinking I'm probably a member of the last generation to have the magic experience of computers quiting the realm of science fiction, stuff we only saw at movies, to become a real world tool. People born after that time surely experience them as trivial, mundane stuff, one is used to since forever. For me, to this day, computers still feel a bit "magic", like flying cars, but that actually happened.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#225

Post by nxobject »

randcraw wrote: post #20
browningstreet wrote: post #5

I 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".

I remember his x86 assembly book really well - I remember him first showing DEBUG.COM and I was like “what??? How is that possible???”

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#226

Post by javier_e06 »

I was carrying a shoebox with my programs in 5 1/4 floppys in at 4th floor of my library where the had dozens of Apple II e PCs. One of of the programs was Turbo Pascal. The first computer science class in 1985 was in Pascal. Funny I was just as interested on the teachings of Blaise Pascal and Pascal's Wager. Like many ones of my generation we wrote an asteroid program where an asterisk was printed in a for loop at a random place between 0 an 79 and produced asterisks coming down the screen and the user had to navigate an caret left-right avoiding the the asterisks. This was not part of my boring assignments. I wrote it and shared with my friends and carried it in my shoebox filled with floppy disks.

Happy Birthday Turbo Pascal. (TP means something else in the US).

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#227

Post by benj111 »

CRConrad wrote: post #189
benj111 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok. I googled and it said ~1.9.

I seem to remember it being the late 90s so that's my bad memory.

Funny, we also call it t'euro in Yorkshire too!

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#228

Post by kristiandupont »

To quote Joel Spolsky:

One day, a spiffy program called Compas Pascal appeared from Denmark, which Philippe Kahn bought and renamed Borland Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal was sort of shocking, since it basically did everything that IBM Pascal did, only it ran in about 33K of memory including the text editor. This was nothing short of astonishing. Even more astonishing was the fact that you could compile a small program in less than one second. It’s as if a company you had never heard of introduced a clone of the Buick LeSabre which could go 1,000,000 MPH and drive around the world on so little gasoline than an ant could drink it without getting sick.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#229

Post by bytehowl »

There's one thing I don't understand.

Whenever TP or Delphi get brought up, people wax nostalgic about how amazing they were, and that they are actually unmatched to this day in certain aspects.

I know the adoption of both got hurt by Borland's and Embarcadero's corporate shenanigans. However, FreePascal and Lazarus are reportedly just as good as Borland's products, but without the business issues. Despite that, they seem to barely get used. Why?

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