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Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

journal.paoloamoroso.com

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Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#2

Post by jim_lawless »

At 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 a nice mix of high-level constructs with low-level access.

Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#4

Post by JKCalhoun »

Turbo Pascal was my first "real" language. Not CP/M, but Macintosh, ha ha.

I was recently able to recover some games I wrote in the late 80's, early 90's and to get some of them to function correctly I had to re-learn Pascal. That too was a rabbit hole.

Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#5

Post by murrayb »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

Turbo Pascal was my first "real" language. Not CP/M, but Macintosh, ha ha. I was recently able to recover some games I wrote in the late 80's, early 90's and to get some of them to function correctly I had to re-learn Pascal. That too was a rabbit hole.

Also the first real programming language I learned, on an early version of DOS (3.?). I wrote a utility to encode data which was burnt to Eeproms for VHF radio's (fixed base units) I don't remember the details but it was cool to write a tool to solve a problem. Fun times.

Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#6

Post by GiorgioG »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

Turbo Pascal was my first "real" language. Not CP/M, but Macintosh, ha ha. I was recently able to recover some games I wrote in the late 80's, early 90's and to get some of them to function correctly I had to re-learn Pascal. That too was a rabbit hole.

Same here - I still have my Turbo Pascal 5.0 install disks!

Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#7

Post by 7ep »

GiorgioG wrote: post #6
JKCalhoun wrote: post #4

Turbo Pascal was my first "real" language. Not CP/M, but Macintosh, ha ha. I was recently able to recover some games I wrote in the late 80's, early 90's and to get some of them to function correctly I had to re-learn Pascal. That too was a rabbit hole.

Same here - I still have my Turbo Pascal 5.0 install disks!

same. I even have my first disk of turbo pascal programs, written by my grandad, on github: https://github.com/byronka/turbopascal

Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#8

Post by gfosco »

I remember being an early teenager on IRC and joining a small BBS development team. I said I knew Pascal, but that was a fib... I did learn it quickly, though, and used it for many years. I can still find the code online, and see my contribution which I get a kick out of... It was a tool that you entered colored ascii frames for an animated "press any key to continue" prompt, and it output a valid pascal function file for that animation.

Re: Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

#9

Post by coliveira »

Turbo 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).
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