[HN Gopher] Turbo Pascal Turns 40
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Turbo Pascal Turns 40
Author : andsoitis
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-11-30 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.marcocantu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.marcocantu.com)
| orionblastar wrote:
| I started with TP 3.0 in high school. It compiled faster than any
| other Pascal. It uses the WordStar editor. My teacher called it
| the cat's pajamas.
| NikkiA wrote:
| TP 2.x and 3.x had integrated editors that were functionally
| similar(inspired by) to WordStar, but were not wordstar, and
| using an external editor was a pain in the ass.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Never wrote a line of code in Turbo Pascal afterward, but taking
| it in HS (somewhat on accident) in 1995 was what set the
| trajectory for the rest of my life.
| cvwright wrote:
| Same here. Even now, I still sometimes set my vim colors to
| blue background and yellow/white text.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That was a common choice for TUI software running in the
| 16-color PC textmode palette. I suppose the blue provided a
| "dark" background with less contrast than actual black. (TUI
| programs of the era generally had a pure black-and-white mode
| too, and the overall look there was not unlike that of *nix
| terminal-based software.)
| vram22 wrote:
| Cool. I should try that. I was a heavy TP user too.
|
| Man, this reminds me of amber screen monitors. I liked them
| better than the green screen ones, but somehow, the amber
| ones seemed to be much less popular, at least in areas where
| I was.
| jprd wrote:
| oof.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I started with Turbo Pascal, and as is often noted by others, I
| spent a lot of time with the book Borland shipped with the
| compiler.
| randcraw wrote:
| And Jeff Duntemann's outstanding "Complete Turbo Pascal".
| rezaprima wrote:
| 25 seconds to compile it? How come ?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| My understanding is the compiler was insanely efficient and
| parts of it coded in assembly if I'm not mistaken.
| ale42 wrote:
| I think that the question was rather why it took 25 seconds
| to the current compiler to compile an Hello world on a
| contemporary computer... Turbo Pascal would have definitely
| done that in a second or less on an 8086 CPU...
| tomcam wrote:
| It was completely written in assembly
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| bear8642 wrote:
| >maybe pascal syntax was also parsing friendly..
|
| Yep, designed to be single pass, recursive descent
| friendly
| qznc wrote:
| Niklaus Wirth (Pascal inventor) had the rule that compiler
| speed must never regress. So if you add an optimization (which
| means the compiler has to do more work), the optimization must
| "pay for itself" and make the compiler faster.
|
| That philosophy probably seeped into Turbo Pascal to some
| degree.
| neilv wrote:
| When I was a kid, a kindly computer store owner (who also made me
| a great deal on an PC-semi-compatible running MS-DOS 1.25, for
| approx. a hundred lawns mowed and babies sat) sold me a copy of
| Turbo Pascal for generic MS-DOS (no PC BIOS assumed) on 8"
| floppy. He transferred it to the 160KB 5.25" format that my semi-
| compatible used.
|
| I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, as I am now. That
| helped bootstrap my career.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Okay, I'll bite :)
|
| What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?
| bluedino wrote:
| I never used the original, but I started with a 2.0 disk I got
| from a friends parent who was taking computer classes in college.
|
| https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-screenshot.php?gi...
|
| It didn't have the trademark Borland IDE yet, but along with this
| Pascal book from the library, I had hours of fun.
|
| Computer Programming in Pascal the Easy Way
| https://a.co/d/3uPpxAw
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Free Pascal still has a look-a-like of the original TP IDE! But
| that code is bitrotting by their own admission (it still relies
| extensively on obsolete quirks of the original MS-DOS platform)
| and it's sad that we don't have a look-a-like version that can
| work as a general editor in the terminal (like neovim or emacs)
| and integrate with modern IDE-oriented facilities like the LSP,
| tree-sitter parsers or the debug adapter protocol. That could
| even be a game changer for editing code remotely from
| SSH/terminal connections.
| tomcam wrote:
| It changed my life and made me want to write compilers for a
| living. I wrote the first one in Turbo Pascal.
| tquinn wrote:
| I first used Turbo Pascal in a high school programming class. I
| remember our teacher saying: "Make it work first, then you can
| make it look pretty."
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| blame-troi wrote:
| we had Turbo, JRT, and UCSD back at my first job out of college.
| All quite good in their way.
| mobilio wrote:
| I started with TP 5.5...
| einpoklum wrote:
| Other than some Logo experience, I first learned "real
| programming" using Turbo Pascal. I was in sixth grade and went to
| a programming summer-camp-of-sorts, held on the grounds of the
| Techno-da science museum (today called the Mada-Tek). At break
| time, one of the other kids got a copy of "Ironman Super Off
| Road" [1], and we would play or watch others try to beat the
| computer. And at break time there were bread rolls with some
| filling I think, and every other day or so it was this chocolate-
| flavored spread.
|
| Man, that was so much fun!... I haven't thought about those times
| in years; thanks for the trip down memory lane :-)
|
| [1] - https://www.mobygames.com/game/4444/ivan-ironman-stewarts-
| su...
| sbarre wrote:
| Ok with a bunch of old hats here, anyone else remember
|
| Technojock's Turbo Toolkit?
|
| It was a UI and eventually object toolkit for Pascal apps and it
| was pretty damn cool for the time.
|
| There isn't much online about it, but everyone I knew who was
| working in TP or BP swore by this in the early 90s..
|
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10277966...
| zwieback wrote:
| Ran it on my Apple ][. It was interesting because another great
| platform on the Apple was UCSD Pascal but Turbo was so much
| slicker and easier to use.
| linsomniac wrote:
| My High School had a computer lab of ~8 Apple ][s with dual
| floppy drives and the CPM board to run UCSD. It worked, but we
| were definitely limited in the number of computers we could use
| due to these limitations. I also had access to an HP 9835 also
| running USCD, so it was very familiar to me.
|
| But part way through my class we switched from UCSD to Turbo
| Pascal, which only needed one floppy and just absolutely
| blazed. It was like a space age rocket ship.
| blorenz wrote:
| My first exposure to TP was when I pirated it off a warez BBS in
| the winter of 93 at the age of 14. The raw power I felt when I
| compiled my own EXE in contrast to running just a .BAS file was
| enthralling! I started modding Renegade BBS and writing door
| programs. I tried to, unsuccessfully, create worms, Trojans and
| viruses. It changed my life and set me on a course for where I am
| in tech today. Moreover I'm reformed my deviant teenage
| tendencies. I owe Borland a lot.
| technothrasher wrote:
| Ah, the good old BBS days. I wrote a door library for Turbo
| Pascal back in '89 when I was 17 after I learned how to write
| an interrupt based serial driver, and then released it as
| shareware. It saw quite a bit of use until the mid-90's when
| the BBS scene fell off a cliff.
| LispSporks22 wrote:
| I still open up TP7 in DOSBox-X to play with "leet code" puzzles.
| They're mostly imperative and the super-fast compilation time and
| debugger are impressive even by today's standards.
| stevage wrote:
| Wow I wrote a lot of Pascal when I was a kid. I then did a bit of
| C but didn't like it much, and moved onto Delphi.
|
| It hadn't occurred to me that Pascal is actually younger than me,
| though not by much.
| coliveira wrote:
| My first language in college was TP. It was such a nice
| environment to use that when I first encountered gcc and similar
| UNIX compilers I thought them to be very primitive.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Turbo Pascal and a few others programs of this era would still be
| utterly relevant technically and pragmatically. Don't forget the
| past.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The language that taught me systems programming should be all
| about, with proper security, modularity and good high level code,
| no need for lack of security shortcuts.
|
| I was blessed to have learnt TP before C.
|
| Happy birthday Turbo Pascal!
| mtillman wrote:
| This brings back great memories. I wrote a text based adventure
| game in turbo pascal for a high school project (97/98) and had a
| blast. It was a really easy language for my needs and skill
| level. Started a life long love of code.
| FpUser wrote:
| I mostly consider languages as a mere tools like a screwdrivers.
| But yet there is that warm fuzzy feeling when I remember lying my
| hands on Turbo Pascal. Comparatively to other "high level" tools
| of the time it was at the different level.
|
| Happy Birthday
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(page generated 2023-11-30 23:00 UTC)