Took me a moment to parse “readbale” correctly. ;)
Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#12At the time of the release of Turbo Pascal 3.x, the IDE's on the CP/M version and MS-DOS version were almost identical. I suspect that the author was using TP 4.x or later on MS-DOS. Turbo Pascal on CP/M was a sweet spot among the development tools of the day. As the author describes, the IDE was very pleasant to use, compile-times were speedy, the generated code was compact, and the language implementation permitted…
Author here. Yes, on MS-DOS I used Turbo Pascal versions later than 4.
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#13Took me a moment to parse “readbale” correctly. ;)
Author here. LOL fixed, thanks.
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#14At the time of the release of Turbo Pascal 3.x, the IDE's on the CP/M version and MS-DOS version were almost identical. I suspect that the author was using TP 4.x or later on MS-DOS. Turbo Pascal on CP/M was a sweet spot among the development tools of the day. As the author describes, the IDE was very pleasant to use, compile-times were speedy, the generated code was compact, and the language implementation permitted…
I think there's a lot of us that got spoiled by the TP IDE. It was night and day more productive than the contemporary environments (particularly on CP/M). Other Pascal (and other) compilers might have been 'better' in some ways, but noone really had the edit->compile->fix workflow in one mostly seemless, easy to use package.
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#15I've had a lot of fun with Turbo Pascal over recent years. Simple single-board computers are easily available from tindie, etc, and even without that there are a lot of CP/M emulators out there.
I hacked up a simple emulator in golang for mac/linux/bsd - https://github.com/skx/cpmulator/ and there's a link to a set of binaries for turbo pascal, and instructions for using it available here:
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist/tree/master/P
There's a highly related post on the front-page right now is about building your own Z80 computer, which would be ideal for running CP/M and thus Turbo Pascal!
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#16Pascal is still kicking around in the modern realm: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#17Turbo Pascal was a fantastic language for the time. However it was exclusive to Borland so other companies won by using standard C and C++, which could compile code for several machines and OSs, and avoided lock up to a single company (Borland).
Turbo Pascal wasn't a language; it was a product, an IDE.
The language was Pascal, and there were compilers (and I suppose IDEs) available from other vendors besides Borland.
So no lock-in. (Well, not on the language itself. If you used too many of Borland's extensions to it, then it took a while for other vendors to catch up. But AFAICR and AIUI, many of them did, after a while; Borland set kind of an "extended" or "industry" standard.)
Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
#18You might enjoy the rabbit hole my friend dug into when he created TRSE: https://lemonspawn.com/ A language (Turbo Rascal Syntax Error), inspired by turbo pascal, that compiles to many of the old processors, including C64 etc.
Turbo Pascal compiled on the native hardware though.