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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)

#91

Post by chihuahua »

agumonkey wrote: post #33
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 hope you won't take my curiosity badly, what made this first project so much better ? it seems interesting but short in perimeter too. Was the rest of your career dulled by politics and large projects management to the point of making the work sluggish and boring ?

What made that first project rewarding is that I had to figure out the math for doing certain geometric calculations: find the angle between the line through these 2 points and the line through these other 2 points. Find the orthogonal distance between this point and this line. Etc. Also, writing code to poll the COM port to communicate with the input device. Those are interesting problems to solve. You get a sense of accomplishment from solving them.

Fortunately, in my professional work, I'm not affected by office politics, and I can handle the overhead of project management. It's just the lack of opportunity to write code that does something interesting (figure out an algorithm that does something non-trivial with this data) that bugs me.

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

#92

Post by agumonkey »

chihuahua wrote: post #91
agumonkey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you won't take my curiosity badly, what made this first project so much better ? it seems interesting but short in perimeter too. Was the rest of your career dulled by politics and large projects management to the point of making the work sluggish and boring ?

What made that first project rewarding is that I had to figure out the math for doing certain geometric calculations: find the angle between the line through these 2 points and the line through these other 2 points. Find the orthogonal distance between this point and this line. Etc. Also, writing code to poll the COM port to communicate with the input device. Those are interesting problems to solve. You get a sense o…

So the lack of intellectual stimulation then ? you need a harder job :D

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

#93

Post by analog31 »

I first learned BASIC in high school, learned Pascal shortly after that.

I think a great thing about Pascal was its origin as a teaching language. As a result, the textbooks placed a heavy emphasis on learning good programming techniques, and the language supported those techniques. I think maybe it's no mere coincidence that good teaching tools also become good general tools for those of us who are not destined to become full time pro's.

Learning BASIC and Pascal side by side was a great lesson in how to write good code, because you could make your Pascal programs so much more readable and organized. Even today, if any human has a faint hope of reading and using my code (in Python or C), it's thanks to the skills I learned from Pascal.

When I got my first computer, a non-PC-compatible MS-DOS machine, I remember my dad asking me some vague questions about it. He had heard us talk about Pascal (my mom and brother both learned it), and the Wall Street Journal had a glowing article about it. He had no idea what it was, but got me it for my birthday. And it followed the "rules" of MS-DOS, so it ran on my weird computer! No graphics, but who cares, I was up and running with Pascal.

I found a magazine article on how to attach a serial port to my computer, wrote a terminal emulator in Pascal, and found an old 300 baud modem. I was able to complete my computer assignments from my dorm room. In FORTRAN.

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

#94

Post by icedchai »

I remember using Turbo Pascal in high school, in my AP Computer Science class. This was in the early 90's, running on a PS/2 model 30 (8mhz 8086.) It was lighting fast, even on those low end machines that were several years old at the time! Fun times.

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

#95

Post by icedchai »

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…

SGI's were amazing! In one of my first jobs out of college (mid 90's) I had an SGI Indy on my desk. The company was a DEC shop and nobody wanted to deal with it. I used it mostly as an X terminal. A couple years back, I bought an O2 off of Ebay.

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

#96

Post by ubermonkey »

My assumption is that a HUGE chunk of developers around my age (50) started out with line-numbered GWBASIC or similar, and then had Turbo Pascal as their first "real" language.

I have had a million technical books in my life, and I held on to many of them for a long time past their technical viability just out of sentimentality. Now I limit myself to half a shelf. On that shelf are my well-worn K&R, a similarly dogeared very early O'Reilly Perl book, the Peter Norton Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC, and a Waite Group book on Turbo Pascal 5.5.

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

#97

Post by webmobdev »

anta40 wrote: post #17

Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming. MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C for programming competitions. Already had some experiences with Basic, and found C to be too "low level" for my taste, I picked Pascal. Next year, I jumped into Delphi: learning Win32 GUI basics and some database programming with MySQL. Probably pretty advance…

Thanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.)

We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C previously). But I still prefer Pascal's overall 'ideology' and syntax over C (except for the BEGIN ... END - would prefer braces :).

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

#98

Post by webmobdev »

timonoko wrote: post #34

At sometime around 1976 Pascal was The Language of the Future. There was some project to program an OS with Pascal in Helsinki, possibly the Russian MIR-computer. Anyways I heard a heated discussion where they wanted money for "tens of man-years". Very annoying, so I wrote Pascal-compiler for 8080 just like that in few months. It was little restricted but quite usable. Then Very Strange Thing happened: the Finnish Ar…

That's an interesting anecdote - so did the Finnish army actually use your Pascal compiler? And when you say you were ordered to write a manual for it, where you in the Finnish army at that time?

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

#99

Post by casid »

Turbo Pascal was my first programming language, I remember hacking together small games with it and sharing them at school on floppy disks.

It's a shame what Embarcadero has done to Turbo Pascal's successor Delphi. It's really an amazing language if it weren't for the god awful IDE.

If you're happen to still work on Delphi enterprise software I'd highly recommend to have a look at OmniPascal (https://www.omnipascal.com/), a very smart VisualStudio code plugin. It's a gem that provides JetBrains-like quality completions/refactorings for Delphi/Pascal.

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

#100

Post by timonoko »

webmobdev wrote: post #98
timonoko wrote: post #34

At sometime around 1976 Pascal was The Language of the Future. There was some project to program an OS with Pascal in Helsinki, possibly the Russian MIR-computer. Anyways I heard a heated discussion where they wanted money for "tens of man-years". Very annoying, so I wrote Pascal-compiler for 8080 just like that in few months. It was little restricted but quite usable. Then Very Strange Thing happened: the Finnish Ar…

That's an interesting anecdote - so did the Finnish army actually use your Pascal compiler? And when you say you were ordered to write a manual for it, where you in the Finnish army at that time?

I was in the University Telecom Lab, but employed by the army in a project to specify a portable texting device, which eventually become the well-known Finnish Army "Kyber"-radiotermimal. I specified the operating system of this non-existing device in my own nokoPascal. This was the time I was playing with my symbolic stack machine, a Forth of sort, but wierd metacharacters which allowed direct execution of "(+ 1 2)" which eventually become Nokolisp. Not a big thing at all -- I just made a Pascal-compiler to this metamachine. http://timonoko.github.io/Nokolisp.htm
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