241–250 of 271 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's biggest downside was that it was limited to producing 64KB .COM files until version 4 or 5.
This is not TP compiler limit. It's format and memory model limit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_file#DOS_binary_format EXE (aka MZ) is using other memory models https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200728-00/?p=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?
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
I had something called Turbo Pascal DiskTutor which if I remember correctly really helped me understand object oriented programming. I also spent quite a lot of time working on a type of rough wireframe 3d CAD editor in regular Turbo Pascal when I was in the 8th grade. I used equations I got from a little reference book my dad had brought from some garage sale or whatever to figure out how to do rotations and perspec…
My first exposure to TP was when I pirated it off a warez BBS in the winter of 93 at the age of 14. The raw power I felt when I compiled my own EXE in contrast to running just a .BAS file was enthralling! I started modding Renegade BBS and writing door programs. I tried to, unsuccessfully, create worms, Trojans and viruses. It changed my life and set me on a course for where I am in tech today. Moreover I’m reformed…
Ah, the good old BBS days. I wrote a door library for Turbo Pascal back in '89 when I was 17 after I learned how to write an interrupt based serial driver, and then released it as shareware. It saw quite a bit of use until the mid-90's when the BBS scene fell off a cliff.
25 seconds to compile it? How come ?
Also, Pascal is a direct descendant of a very, very old language (ALGOL-58 from 1958). In the 1950s, HLL compilation was at the extreme edge of what computers were capable of doing and a key goal of language design was (or should have been - cough COBOL cough ) to make it as efficient as possible. By the time Ken Thompson was designing languages, hardware had improved a lot and he could make compilation efficiency a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, I'll bite :) What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?
Back in the early days, MS-DOS was very much like CP/M in that there were several different 8088 machines. The “PC Compatible” hadn’t quite exploded yet, so MS-DOS (and CP/M 86) compatibility was enough. But soon, Flight Simulator became the benchmark for compatibility, and I think the final nail was that Lotus 1-2-3 required an actual PC compatible machine. That plus the rise of clone BIOSs pretty much ended the bri…
Halt and Catch Fire covers this. I could be wrong though.
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…
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…
Ah, the mark. It's been a while. Maybe this was just in Britain but the name of the mark was never translated into English when spoken or written, it was always just the Deustchmark.
One of the best things about Turbo Pascal was having to declare all variables upfront at the beginning of functions. I really don't know why languages like C, Java or JavaScript started to allow variable definitions everywhere. Needing to declare variables first leads to much cleaner functions.
Strongly disagree. I want to have variables that only exist within an `if` block. That is something C99 got right. But Python's leaky scopes are even worse than up-front declarations.
C89 allowed you to declare variables at the top of any block, not just functions, so you could declare variables that only exist within in if block. For example:
if (flag) {
int c;
while ((c = getchar()) != EOF) {
/* code */
}
}