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Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

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Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#81

Post by c-cube »

augustk wrote: post #68
KronisLV wrote: post #48

It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal ( https://www.freepascal.org/ ) and the Lazarus IDE ( https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) both of which seem like stable, open and capable projects. That said, i'm afraid that modern Pascal isn't awfully popular, which hurts its practicality a bit (e.g. learning about it, finding tutorials and others' experience with it, getting help). However, it's a…

> It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal The latest language from Niklaus Wirth is Oberon which was last updated in 2016. It is both smaller and more capable than Pascal. https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

In what ways is it more capable than Pascal? At first glance Pascal seemed to have more features (including discriminated unions)?

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#82

Post by jksmith »

kcartlidge wrote: post #62

Nostalgia! I learned programming in my own time on 1980's 8-bit machines, but in college it was Pascal on Vax VMS then Turbo Pascal on, IIRC, an Act Sirius. Loved the language. Then along came JPI TopSpeed Modula-2 (Pascal++ [joke]) and even though I now do C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and FreePascal, nothing matches the sheer productivity and performance that TopSpeed provided. And their IDE was incredible at the tim…

Yeah I have to say if TSM2 had been maintained I'd still be using it. It was badass. Remember that green thread car traffic demo? That was cute. It's unfortunate the tyranny of C never let M2 break through. Opinion is that the software world would would be in better shape now if M2 had gotten a real foothold.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#84

Post by jksmith »

odersky wrote: post #56
LawrenceWoodman wrote: post #28

Turbo Pascal is great and I love the fact that it uses the Wordstar key combinations. I wish that there was a version for 8080 but I understand why they went with the Z80. Borland went on to create Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M which was very similar to TP but with lots of language enhancements and faster execution time of the resulting binaries. However, it was released quite late in 1986 and quickly withdrawn.

I was the co-author of Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M. It was quite a capable system to fit in less than 64K. Great memories. At the time Borland intended to develop their own version of Modula-2 for IBM PC, so they bought ours as a complement for the CP/M versions they were still covering. But the in-house version got delayed a lot. It was eventually released as Topspeed Modula-2 several years later, from a spinoff. If Bor…

Kudos. I loved M2. I haven't replicated the sublime satisfaction I enjoyed from writing M2 since, in any other language. I felt like I could produce most any business solution with it, one module at a time.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#85

Post by mobilio »

codesnik wrote: post #64

Pascal is under-appreciated. TurboPascal was my first programming language/platform on PC (used 286 in 1994) and the only problem I had was lack of documentation on actual video and sound hardware, not with the language itself. I was surprised to learn that many DOS-era games I loved were written in pascal actually, some of them were pretty performant (Tyrian, for example). Almost on the topic: in Russia there were p…

Here in Bulgaria we had Pravetz computers and Pascal was learned in past on schools.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#86

Post by jksmith »

FpUser wrote: post #11
smlckz wrote: post #8

Hmm, I started reading the Wikipedia article on the Pascal programming language. I was reading about the pointer types and saw a 'with' statement... Where did I see something like that before?... Yes, JavaScript! Where it is highly discouraged to use. How is it like in Pascal?

It is discouraged in Pascal as well. Can give really nasty surprises with scoping / debugging. Well to me it is mostly gossip as I refuse to use WITH in my Pascal code so no practical experience.

Meh, you do have to watch your scope using "with," but it's worth the brevity provided if you write pascal code crafted to be sensitive to unit/class/record dependencies. If I was putting together a team, it might be prudent to include some coding governance around "with" I admit.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#87

Post by signaru »

KronisLV wrote: post #48

It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal ( https://www.freepascal.org/ ) and the Lazarus IDE ( https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) both of which seem like stable, open and capable projects. That said, i'm afraid that modern Pascal isn't awfully popular, which hurts its practicality a bit (e.g. learning about it, finding tutorials and others' experience with it, getting help). However, it's a…

I had my share of porting C# GUI programs to Object Pascal (Lazarus/Delphi). I think the best part of FreePascal are the "outputs". I will always choose native GUI easily multi-platform programs over framework-dependent bytecode Windows-biased programs. It's also pleasant that you don't have to spend hours figuring out how to compile popular GUI framework X for C/C++ while Lazarus/Delphi just works out of the box. For the latter, the de facto GUI framework feels more in "harmony" with the language/compiler toolchain.

However, as a language, Pascal is a bit of a pain. The parts that frustrate me the most, are the necessity of editing code across separate locations when introducing a new variable/function and the lack of smaller scopes beyond function scope. Brian W. Kernighan's "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" (1981) lists some of these frustrating parts, although there are many improvements since then.

I think more recent pascal compilers now support declarations elsewhere aside the interface section or beginning of a function. But more recent also means less support for older systems, which is part of what I like about Pascal.

And if my program doesn't need a GUI, I feel that C/C++ is far more productive for multi-platform-compilable native programs.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#88

Post by analog31 »

froh wrote: post #9

I really wonder how Pascal and the Pascal family of languages, including modula/oberon and ada, how they became niche and how java and c++ took over the world?

Just an amusing anecdote, I learned Pascal in 1982, but also some limited exposure to C. At the time, I was absolutely dead certain that Pascal would win out over C. While I understood what was happening under the hood, the business of programming by doing math on pointers seemed like such a bug factory that I dismissed it out of hand.

Today when I program in C (thanks to embedded work), it seems like many of the modern improvements to the language consist of making it more Pascal-like.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#89

Post by ubermonkey »

chihuahua wrote: post #6

The first software "product" that I sold was created using Turbo Pascal running on DOS. I was in high school at the time. It was designed for an Orthodontist who wanted to input (using a tablet with a cross-hair "mouse") about 20 points from an X-ray of a patient's head, then perform some calculations on the geometry to predict how the jaw bones and teeth were going to develop as the patient gets older. To this day I…

I have a good friend who has avoided big-co software work his whole career. He writes software for telescopes. Often, it's in Haskell.

He does not have this problem, but I suspect he's left lots of money on the table as a result.

Re: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

#90

Post by pjmlp »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60
pjmlp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. Long answer, UNIX spread like fire, because Bell Labs/AT&T initially weren't allowed to sell it. So the code was given to university, and while they needed to pay for a UNIX license to use it, the price was symbolic versus paying for something like VMS. Which naturally made UNIX the number one choice for the startups trying to get into the Workstation market during the 90's. So C star…

> Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. On Unix mass adoption... My best friend (and still best friend to this day) in the early 90s had an SGI Indy at home (his stepfather happened to be the director of SGI Benelux) and so I got to play with one of the earliest SGI Indy. What a machine to have, for teenagers into computing, at home in the early nineties! The shock, the world of difference between a beige box running MS-D…

My first UNIX was Xenix, on a PC carried into the class once a week, that was then shared in turns between students.

Hardly impressive, with its green phosphor terminal.

SGI was interesting, then again I guess you didn't had much contact with Atari and Amiga scene back then, right?

Object Pascal dialect was originally created by Apple in collaboration with Niklaus Wirth (see clascal), used to write the Lisa and Mac OS operating systems (naturally they also had their share of Assembly, like UNIX also does).

They only switched to C and C++ after market pressure to have some compatibility with them.

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