Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than 487
theodp writes "James Hague has compiled a short list of things that the circa-1986 Turbo Pascal 3 for MS-DOS is smaller than (chart). For starters, at 39,731 bytes, the entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable (compiler and IDE) makes it less than 1/4th the size of the image of the white iPhone 4S at apple.com (190,157 bytes), and less than 1/5th the size of the yahoo.com home page (219,583 bytes). Speaking of slim-and-trim software, Visicalc, the granddaddy of all spreadsheet software which celebrated its 32nd birthday this year, weighed in at a mere 29K."
Killer App (Score:3, Interesting)
I hated Turbo Pascal (Score:4, Interesting)
In my first job, I was responsible for developing a programming environment for a Pascal-like language that included a visual editor, interpreter and debugger. I remember my boss showing up in my office and showing me an ad he had cooked up, with big, bold lettering saying "Runs in 256 kB!"
As a young developer, it was one of the tougher moments in my life to admit that we were going to need a full 512 kB.
It was difficult living in a world where Turbo Pascal ran comfortably on a 64 kB machine.
Re:Pascal v/s C (Score:4, Interesting)
It was the same with me. I learned Turbo Pascal and knew about pointers, but only when I switched to C I realized that pointers are numbers, like indexes in an array.
There were a lot of things that were easier to understand in C than in Pascal. For example scanf and printf were just library functions, while in Pascal readln and writeln were parts of the language. Also, what "#include " did was perfectly clear - a simple text substitution, i.e. the same as if I had gone the header and copy-pasted its contents in the .c file, while in Pascal when you write "uses crt;" I wasn't sure what actually happens. The fact that text was an array of numbers was not clear to me while I was using pascal, what with all the Chr and Ord function to move from Character to Integer, and strings were part of the language and were like blackboxes.
Despite being Pascal, it was tight. (Score:4, Interesting)
Turbo Pascal was pretty sweet, even though it came from Borland, and even if it was Pascal. It could compile 5,000 lines of code in the blink of the eye. Embedding assembly into it? No problem. It didn't care. The editor was supreme as well. Even when I stopped using TP, I still used the editor every day for a decade after the fact because it could do absolutely everything.
I'm not sure where all the hating is coming from, because TP did not generate hugely bloated executables. The only problem with it was that it eventually was discontinued, so special hacks like paspatch were required to patch TP compiled executables on the P II and higher to allow them to run.
It was actually closer to 512K with all of its dependencies, but it was damn fine.
Re: Code Compactly in Notepad (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking of bloat, there's a humorously insightful article here about http://www.trygve.com/doomsday.html [trygve.com]
Those WYSIWYG creators produce the most gawdawful code full of
Re:Quite sad how bloated everything is (Score:5, Interesting)
And that attitude is why we lost the phone and tablet markets. There was a time when Linux was perfect for older systems... the sort of specs that also happen to match up with new small platforms. But we got that 'screw em, let them buy a real computer' attitude and now /bin/touch on my Fedora 15 laptop is 60856 bytes. The little gadget in my XFCE tray to allow me to control the backlight is currently reporting 6200K in resident set. XFCE is supposed to be the 'lighter' alternative to the GNOME freak show. Ever wonder why Google passed all the userland by and made their own for Android? Well now you know and your attitude is what caused it.
Nokia was stupid enough to believe they could build small devices by reusing parts of the Linux desktop, they failed. Good grief, look how much bloat is in little things like esd or pulseaudio. Megabytes of resident set sitting around in case something wants to make a sound? In hardware that had as little as 64MB Ram (Nokia N770 tablet) that sort of resource misuse killed them.
There was a time when System V UNIX would run on machines with a MB or two of RAM, with terminals hanging off serial ports and a couple tens of megabytes of hard drive could run a retail operation.
Yes there is something to be said for trading developer time for hardware. The time to do that is vertical apps and other applications where the number of deployed systems is small compared to the developer hours available. In a mass deployed application the developers should be required to care a little more about what they are asking millions of users to throw away to the great God of the upgrade treadmill.