I still have it installed to play the bridge.
Turbo Pascal Turns 40
141–150 of 271 posts
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#142Earlier 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…
Flight simulator as a test … still remember my boss tick that out as said you really cannot put that as requirement. We are in business not playing game …
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#143The 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…
This was true also for TurboC.
Today, good luck looking for examples.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
hand written and also optimized for throughput right ? maybe pascal syntax was also parsing friendly.. i don't recall one thing for sure is that it felt near instant if not real time building small projects, to the point that 14yo me was completely unaware of meaning of Compile until years later.
>maybe pascal syntax was also parsing friendly.. Yep, designed to be single pass, recursive descent friendly
And despite being single pass, you could call functions and procedures before you defined them (later in the code), by using the forward declaration feature of Pascal.
Because of this feature, the language could also support mutually recursive functions, which some other languages might not have been able to (not sure).
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's being used to this day (or until very recently, at least) in some countries, generally running under dosbox because DOS software can no longer run natively in modern PC OS's.
FreeDOS exists.. https://freedos.org/
That can no longer run on many modern computers as the backwards-compatible BIOS is phased out, not to mention many computers switching to ARM.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#146Pedro Pascal is 8 years older
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#147Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#148I almost coded some Turbo Pascal earlier this year. I found the source code for one of the (not so great) games I (tried to) write in Turbo Pascal 2.0 as a kid. Had fun porting it to the latest stable Free Pascal. Never used Free Pascal before and was quite impressed. Well documented, stable, amazing cross-platform. Supports everything from creating 16-bit DOS COM-files to various modern 64-bit platforms and JS.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#149One 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.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I owe Borland a lot." A belated license to be exact :P
I pirated Turbo Pascal back in the day because I was a poor student in a Third World country and there was no way I could afford it. Ditto Turbo C. After I started working, I had a hand in selecting Borland C++ as our in-house development platform, and we paid Borland a fortune in licensing fees. Which would have gone to Intel or another company if it were not for my, and other folks in my cohort's experience with pi…
The lesson is that piracy (and to an only slightly lesser extent, free student licences) was an extremely powerful tool to keep a tool market cornered: impossible to compete on price when piracy is so ubiquitous that payment is essentially opt-in.
(I had a mouse driver disc, 5.25, that wasn't pirated, it felt like something from a parallel universe with its machine-printed label)