Turbo Pascal Turns 40 • Hacker News Board

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#231

Post by proaralyst » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

bytehowl wrote: post #229

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…

I'd guess it's the same thing that makes any niche language difficult to use for real: developer education, tooling and lack of third party libraries. Mainstream languages tend to have these three things in spades, and the language itself is good enough.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#232

Post by justin66 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

theboywho wrote: post #159

Fun fact: one of Niklaus Wirth (the author of Pascal) students was Martin Odersky, who went on to create Scala.

Robert Griesemer, one of the creators of Go, did his PhD under Hanspeter Mössenböck and Niklaus Wirth.

More relevant to the thread at hand: Martin Odersky wrote Turbo Modula-2.

https://www.artima.com/articles/the-origins-of-scala

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704733

(as with C# vs Scala, Hejlsberg's Turbo Pascal was faster and more popular than Odersky's Turbo Modula-2)

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#233

Post by linker3000 » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 4:40 PM UTC

stevekemp wrote: post #125

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

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".

May I interest you in a game of Snake for that.

https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board/blob/master/snake.pa...

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#234

Post by Zaskoda » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

I made this in Turbo Pascal: https://dosgames.com/game/bob-and-his-amazing-journey-home/

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#235

Post by OnlyMortal » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

Turbo Pascal had a large influence on me back in the late 1980s. It was, to me, the premier way of writing DOS applications.

I also liked JPI Modula 2: http://www.edm2.com/index.php/TopSpeed_Modula-2

However, Turbo-C rocked and allowed me to write code for DOS and Macintosh (MPW).

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#236

Post by HagopPanosian » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

Turbo Pascal is still in the very good hands of Embarcadero Technologies and Delphi and Marco Cantu. One of the best value propositions for app development targeting multiple platforms simultaneously with native code.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#237

Post by marcocantu » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #117

I tried to view the article. First, I got a certificate error. I tried again, and I got a proxy error. I tried again, and then I got a "WebCommand Error". So, then I tried again, and this time the connection timed out.

Yes, sorry, it's an old personal blog based on my own code, which doesn't handle traffic spikes very well

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#238

Post by marcocantu » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #221

dist1ll wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Delphi is single pass today... this has drawbacks, but the compiler is fast!

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#239

Post by hulitu » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

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…

> That's because the "fully featured" of the 90s would be barely usable today.

Saying that in a thread about TurboPascal is strange. I mean notepad needs about 5 seconds to start on my windows 10 work computer. And the usability of windows 10 is ... not.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#240

Post by spiralx » Fri, Dec 01, 2023, 7:34 PM UTC

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…

Same here. I'd been using GFA Basic for a couple of years when I came across Turbo Pascal which really helped - being a version of BASIC with code blocks, variable types including records, functions and procedures and even references - so I picked up Pascal just by reading the help documentation and studying the numerous very clear and helpful examples included on almost every page.

This was a good couple of years before I discovered the Internet at university so there was no easy access to learning resources. I'd tried to pick up C a couple of times without much luck before learning TP, and it wasn't until after that that I then was able to transfer what I'd learnt from Pascal to C - although again that was aided by another great Borland product, C++ Builder :)