Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
turbopascal.org
Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
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Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#2Turbo Pascal was the first language I was taught in school, although I had already taught myself BASIC on a BBC B Microcomputer as a child.
I loved Pascal and wrote a race management program for my local sailing club when I was 16. Fond memories. The whole experience was a voyage of discovery, as I had to write my own "windows" style UI using ASCII codes.
I used Delphi later on in university along with Modular2, and C++. I never felt the same passion for these languages as I had had for Turbo Pascal.
I later moved on to VB and VBscript, and didn't like them at all but they paid the bills.
The next time I felt that same type of passion was for C#. Somehow it just clicked. I think it is about what you can achieve productively with the language, as well as the language itself.
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#3Turbo Pascal was the first language I was taught in school, although I had already taught myself BASIC on a BBC B Microcomputer as a child. I loved Pascal and wrote a race management program for my local sailing club when I was 16. Fond memories. The whole experience was a voyage of discovery, as I had to write my own "windows" style UI using ASCII codes. I used Delphi later on in university along with Modular2, and…
You will then be pleased to know that C# development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg, the same Anders mentioned in the article that created what went to become Borland Turbo Pascal. IIRC, he also led the development of Borland Delphi and its language, Object Pascal.
He is really a prolific language designer, one of the unsung heroes of that area.
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#4This site doesn't describe the internals of Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler. It describes a compiler written in Turbo Pascal that can compile some subset of Turbo Pascal's language.
Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler was written in 16-bit x86 assembly, mostly by Anders Hejlsberg.
There is an explanation of this on the front page of the site, but it's not clear from the headline.
(I used to work at Borland on the Delphi compiler, and had access to the source of tpc.exe.)
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#5> Anders Hejlsberg developed Blue Label Pascal... This compiler was later licensed by a software company Borland which added user interface and editor, changed the name to Turbo Pascal and offered it for a competitive price.
Nooo... Another account of TP origins was that it was written by Philippe Kahn (the founder of Borland), back when he was just a one-man operation running from a small office on top of a Jaguar car service shop. But apparently it wasn't. Damn.
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#6Turbo Pascal was the first language I was taught in school, although I had already taught myself BASIC on a BBC B Microcomputer as a child. I loved Pascal and wrote a race management program for my local sailing club when I was 16. Fond memories. The whole experience was a voyage of discovery, as I had to write my own "windows" style UI using ASCII codes. I used Delphi later on in university along with Modular2, and…
You will then be pleased to know that C# development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg, the same Anders mentioned in the article that created what went to become Borland Turbo Pascal. IIRC, he also led the development of Borland Delphi and its language, Object Pascal. He is really a prolific language designer, one of the unsung heroes of that area.
Object Pascal was originally an Apple invention (with help from Wirth), and made some strides towards ISO standardisation. However it used a value-based OO model that made vtables optional until you added the first virtual method, permitted object slicing, had no common ancestor for all classes, had an odd syntax for calling constructors (using extra parameters to New), etc.
Delphi introduced a new object model while retaining the old object model for backward compatibility. The language was renamed to Delphi some time later to reflect this; while Object Pascal in practice meant the language that the Borland compilers compiled, its technical and historical meaning is both broader (more compilers) and more limited (a smaller language with different features).
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#7I loved Turbo Pascal.
When I got to learn C, already had Turbo Pascal 3, 4, 5.5 and 6.0 on my toolbox.
Compared with Turbo Pascal, the only thing C had going for it was being available in other systems. Everything else was meh.
No memory safe handling, no bounds checking, no units (modules), no namespacing, no proper strings, no OOP support, arrays decaying into pointers, no type safe enumerations, no sets, no generic array indexes...
At least C++ allowed me to get some of those Turbo Pascal features back.
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will then be pleased to know that C# development team is led by Anders Hejlsberg, the same Anders mentioned in the article that created what went to become Borland Turbo Pascal. IIRC, he also led the development of Borland Delphi and its language, Object Pascal. He is really a prolific language designer, one of the unsung heroes of that area.
Object Pascal was originally an Apple invention (with help from Wirth), and made some strides towards ISO standardisation. However it used a value-based OO model that made vtables optional until you added the first virtual method, permitted object slicing, had no common ancestor for all classes, had an odd syntax for calling constructors (using extra parameters to New), etc. Delphi introduced a new object model while…
Interestingly I just Googled Borland to see what they do these days: http://www.borland.com/Products
Seems like they made quite a major pivot?
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#9This site doesn't describe the internals of Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler. It describes a compiler written in Turbo Pascal that can compile some subset of Turbo Pascal's language. Borland's Turbo Pascal compiler was written in 16-bit x86 assembly, mostly by Anders Hejlsberg. There is an explanation of this on the front page of the site, but it's not clear from the headline. (I used to work at Borland on the Delphi…
.. thats the story I was hoping to read, and have been waiting for, for many years.
I went from the necessity of A86 assembler, thru the desperation of GW-Basic .. finally finding Turbo Pascal, which was a revelation at the time, just this phenomenal product and superb piece of engineering.
Pulldown text menus, draggable text windows, editor out of the box .. fast compilation, wow - to me its one of the great monuments of computer history. I feel intensely nostalgic looking back on it now.
And their manuals were first rate.. classy all round.
Re: Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler
#10I loved Turbo Pascal. When I got to learn C, already had Turbo Pascal 3, 4, 5.5 and 6.0 on my toolbox. Compared with Turbo Pascal, the only thing C had going for it was being available in other systems. Everything else was meh. No memory safe handling, no bounds checking, no units (modules), no namespacing, no proper strings, no OOP support, arrays decaying into pointers, no type safe enumerations, no sets, no generi…
Pascal was off time. A lot of these traits are really worthy, but it wasn't attractive at the time .. was it as 'performant' as C too or was it a very nice environment to craft sound code productively whereas C code could allow you to tap into hardware more aggressively no matter how much headaches that would give you ?