40 years of Turbo Pascal: Memories of the Coding Dinosaur that Revolutionized IDEs (theregister.com) 113
TechSpot remembers that Turbo Pascal "stands out as one of the first instances of an integrated development environment (IDE), providing a text-based interface through which developers could write their code, compile it, and finally link it with runtime libraries."
The early IDE, written in Assembly, eschewed the use of floppies, instead building the code directly in RAM for an unprecedented performance boost.
The language demonstrated superior speed, greater convenience, and a more affordable price compared to its competition. Philippe Kahn, Borland's CEO who initially conceptualized turning the new language into an all-in-one product, decided to sell the software via mail orders for just $49.95, establishing a market presence for the then-newly founded company.
It was called "Turbo" because its use of RAM made it considerable faster, adds the Register: Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool...
Version 1 had limitations. Source code files, for example, were limited to 64 KB. It would only produce .COM executable files for DOS and CP/M — although other architectures and operating systems were supported. It would also run from a single floppy disk, saving users from endless swapping in a world where single drives were the norm and a hard disk seemed impossibly exotic — and expensive... However, it was with version 4, in 1987, that Turbo Pascal changed dramatically. For one, support for CP/M and CP/M-86 was dropped, and the compiler would generate .EXE executables under DOS, lifting the .COM restrictions...
For this writer, 1989's version 5.5 was peak Turbo Pascal. Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger. Version 6 and 7 brought in inline assembly and support for the creation of Windows executables and DLLs respectively, but version 7 also marked the end of the line as far as Borland was concerned. Turbo Pascal for Windows would turn up, but was eventually superseded by Delphi.
However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS. As for Turbo Pascal, several versions were eventually released by Borland as freeware including version 1 for DOS, 5.5, and 7.
I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal. (Functions, subroutines, and procedures...)
Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?
The language demonstrated superior speed, greater convenience, and a more affordable price compared to its competition. Philippe Kahn, Borland's CEO who initially conceptualized turning the new language into an all-in-one product, decided to sell the software via mail orders for just $49.95, establishing a market presence for the then-newly founded company.
It was called "Turbo" because its use of RAM made it considerable faster, adds the Register: Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool...
Version 1 had limitations. Source code files, for example, were limited to 64 KB. It would only produce .COM executable files for DOS and CP/M — although other architectures and operating systems were supported. It would also run from a single floppy disk, saving users from endless swapping in a world where single drives were the norm and a hard disk seemed impossibly exotic — and expensive... However, it was with version 4, in 1987, that Turbo Pascal changed dramatically. For one, support for CP/M and CP/M-86 was dropped, and the compiler would generate .EXE executables under DOS, lifting the .COM restrictions...
For this writer, 1989's version 5.5 was peak Turbo Pascal. Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger. Version 6 and 7 brought in inline assembly and support for the creation of Windows executables and DLLs respectively, but version 7 also marked the end of the line as far as Borland was concerned. Turbo Pascal for Windows would turn up, but was eventually superseded by Delphi.
However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS. As for Turbo Pascal, several versions were eventually released by Borland as freeware including version 1 for DOS, 5.5, and 7.
I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal. (Functions, subroutines, and procedures...)
Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?
Computing flashback! (Score:5, Insightful)
A story about refurbing a PDP/11, and now this on Turbo Pascal. Brings back a lot of memories...
Re:Computing flashback! Times Two! (Score:2)
I wrote an application in TP 3.01 that interfaced a HP HP-150 PC to some test instruments via the IEEE-488 interface that was built into both the HP-150 and the test instruments. We were able to connect four instruments to one PC and run them all simultaneously. The application eliminated a BUNCH of manual calculations which were error prone. It was used to accept or reject tractor trailer loads of filters we were purchasing from another vendor.
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IDE was really good (Score:2)
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Pascal Memory (Score:3)
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I used Delphi at work for a while. It was better that C and early C++. Delphi was pretty popular in Germany back in the day, same with Turbo Pascal before it.
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Right after Delphi, Borland brought the same development approach (with a nice IDE and easily added components) to C/C++. So unless you knew Pascal and not C, there was no good reason to stick with Delphi. Borland good compilers for C as well. Even before Delphi they had Turbo C/C++ to match their Turbo Pascal line. At the time it was believed that Pascal could rival C, it was possibly even dominant on Macintosh during the early 68k era up into the Macintosh II days. But even before they moved on to PowerPC
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I knew ajd developed in both, but simply considered Borland's Pascal dialects better languages than C and C++. In my opinion C++ only became bearable at C++11 and the main reason of Pascal's downfall was the "not invented here" syndrome in the USA. This is why I like C# - it feels like Delphi shoehorned to look like C++ in order to not stand out.
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Pascal was made to be user-hostile because it was designed as an educational tool. Also, Pascal implementations were generally not compatible and source code not portable. Those were much better reasons for its lack of commercial adoption. In comparison, C was a dream.
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The portability problem could and would have been solved if there was ongoing demand. But you're right, it was made deliberately goofy because that was somehow considered to be an asset in a teaching language, which is provably false. Why would you not want to learn a language you might actually use some day? Insane.
Mod up (Score:2)
I can't believe you got modded Troll for that comment. I guess the one remaining Pascal fanboy has mod points today.
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Nah, he just gets modded down for being a general asshat.
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Well, I think the guy who modded you troll, modded the wrong post troll.
Your above post deserves a troll.
And this post deserves a troll: https://developers.slashdot.or... [slashdot.org]
PASCAL at its pinnacle was the most widely used programming language on the planet. From the new upcoming "PCs" over mini computers (the word does not mean what it seems to mean) to Main Frames.
And Turbo Pascal did not invent the IDE ... UCSD Pascal had it long before.
And the idiot who told us Pascal was not interoperable, or cross compliab
Re: Pascal Memory (Score:1)
What was goofy about Pascal operators is that they were DELIBERATELY made different from other languages. And it was specifically BECAUSE it was considered to be a teaching language. Making it different because it was for students was doing them a disservice.
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What was goofy about Pascal operators is that they were DELIBERATELY made different from other languages. And it was specifically BECAUSE it was considered to be a teaching language. Making it different because it was for students was doing them a disservice.
When Pascal came out in 1970, its AND and OR operators were much the same as those of BASIC (early 1960s). It's true that they didn't follow those of C, but given that C only came out in about 1972 that may not have been a deliberate decision from the designer of Pascal!
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>>I honestly think Pascal's downfall was its weird operators.
I actually preferred := for assignment and = for comparison (versus = and == in C/Java/Python/etc), it just seemed more natural, but yeah there was a lot of unnecessary extra typing like Begin and End for block markers instead of braces (or just indenting).
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Case in point, copy-paste any Python code sample from the web into your editor and try to run it: it never works because the 4 spaces became tabs or 3 spaces or the opposite...
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it never works because the 4 spaces became tabs or 3 spaces or the opposite...
Never heard about a copy paste that converts spaces to tabs and vice versa
You copy Python code.
Put the curser.
Paste it
And it is below the point, where you put the curser, how it should be.
No idea what you are doing.
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On a German keyboard it was actually faster to type begin and end than curly brackets.
Re: Pascal Memory (Score:1)
Beginnen and Ende, surely?
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I first learned C++ Builder on a personal project, then moved in a work place with Delphi and somehow liked it better (I previously used Turbo Pascal and turbo C, liked Pascal more). That was Delphi 4, later Delphi 5 felt slow and clunky.
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Similar for me. My Pascal memories were from a required course as well, and probably why I never wanted to use it.
I had previously taken a class in COBOL at a different school using punchcards and never stuck with that one either. My preferred poison was Fortran.
Re:Pascal Memory (Score:4, Interesting)
When Turbo Pascal became big, there were no C options for the PC. Furthermore, typical high level language tools were unaffordable to many of the earliest PC developers. Also, the general consensus at the time was that software worth doing was done in assembly. Turbo Pascal was the premier learning tool before C was even a thing outside of Unix. When Microsoft introduced CodeView, things changed.
Also, an interesting detail about CodeView was that it supported dual monitors so that you could see a debug screen and an app screen at the same time. In the 80's. Long before the Mac even supported dual monitors (yet Apple fanboys have forever insisted that Apple invented multi-monitor). CV was as big a step forward as Turbo Pascal was.
My Turbo Pascal setup was a blazing 8088 with a true 640K of memory, not the mythical 640K the peanut gallery likes to make fun of, that partitioned memory into mostly Ramdisk that was made bootable directly into Turbo Pascal. Incredibly fast and productive. Also, while TP apps were limited to 64K total memory, it provided support for long pointers. That allowed you to manipulate the screen directly, write graphics code, call the BIOS and install interrupt handlers. It was very capable back when software wasn't built on a mile high stack of shit like it is today.
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No C options for the PC? What are you talking about?
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I'm talking about "when Turbo Pascal became big". In those days, high level languages were not even popular with the PC, applications were written in assembly. Sure, Lattice had a C compiler, who used it? Microsoft didn't offer a C compiler until quite some time later, and even then they rebranded Lattice rather than develop their own.
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Lattice had thousands of users from the DOS 3.11 days on, and ASM was not the majority language on DOS. There was lots of BASIC, PASCAL, C and even FORTAN in use in commercial applications. ASM was where you needed to be for efficient code, at least until compilers got good, but was not the best way to build a lot of software.
As you mentioned, Microsoft resold the Lattice C compiler and base DOS libraries until they developed their own in-house version in the very late 80s. Lattice also had native C compile
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Except it wasn't 'weird' at the time. Lots of programs followed the WordStar standard. It only seems weird to us now because we're used to modern innovations like the 'inverted T' arrow key cluster. (Why that took so long to figure out, I'll never know.) It really wasn't all that bad. 'asdf' moved your cursor horizontally, the outer letters whole words, the inner letters single characters, while e and x moved up and down. It wouldn't have been all that great for games, but it wasn't intended for that.
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Everybody had a C compiler.
I programmed in C on an Apple ][ long before (10 years?) Turbo Pascal was invented.
Aztec C. Super complicated environment, but had everything:
C compiler
Assembler
Archivar
Linker
No make, I think, not sure.
K&R C - absurd down step from UCSD Pascal
But kind of fun.
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Also, an interesting detail about CodeView was that it supported dual monitors so that you could see a debug screen and an app screen at the same time. In the 80's. Long before the Mac even supported dual monitors
One reason dual displays was common on early PCs was that multi-sync monitors hadn't been invented yet. If you wanted both sharp text and pretty graphics on the same machine, you had to get two adapter cards (monochrome and CGA), along with the corresponding incompatible monitor for each one.
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Those were the days. CGA graphics! And Apple thought color was for losers, particularly Steve Jobs did. It's really amazing that Jobs isn't known for the dumbass that he was, like Musk today.
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Well, you are the new idiot in the house. No idea why I did not notice you idiot before. As you seem to be long time here ..
Macs ... during Steve Jobs times, before he was kicked out of Apple where:
Kind of intelligent devices to address a LASER PRINTER
The printers would print black and white -aka- grey scale. For: print publishing -aka- a newspaper.
So: when I used to play Warlords ... we played on an 23 inch ... 256 gray scale monitor Can you even imagine how absurd awesome a board game looks on a 256 gray
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... ...
Also, while TP apps were limited to 64K total memory, it provided support for long pointers.
It was 64KB loaded in RAM at once. I wrote program which required more than 64KB. Basically, you could use overlays to load some code in the 64KB space, unload it and load other program code in that RAM space, repeat the process and you could have quite large programs.
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IIRC, you had another 64K to maintain state between overlays.
Re: Pascal Memory (Score:2)
I think it depends on the computer platform you were using back then. In Amiga-land circa 1987, there were basically two languages that mattered: 680x0 Assembly, and C (not ++). Other languages obviously *existed* (AmigaBASIC, ABasiC, TrueBasic, GFA Basic, Modula-2, ARexx, etc), but as a practical matter, if you wanted to write software OTHER Amiga owners could run without themselves owning a copy of the language, your choices were basically Assembly & C. Good stuff was written in assembly, shitty stuff
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I'm not (and never was) an Amiga guy, but nevertheless I'd wish to comment on some of your claims
In Amiga-land circa 1987, there were basically two languages that mattered: 680x0 Assembly, and C (not ++). Other languages obviously *existed* (AmigaBASIC, ABasiC, TrueBasic, GFA Basic, Modula-2, ARexx, etc), but as a practical matter, if you wanted to write software OTHER Amiga owners could run without themselves owning a copy of the language, your choices were basically Assembly & C.
This sounds surprising to me (especially about Modula-2). You say, Amiga had a Modula-2 translator that produced programs which needed a runtime to be installed on the target machine? This is quite weird for Modula-2, IMHO. I own a Modula-2 compiler for DOS (Topspeed), from roughly the same time, that produced EXEs which were quite standalone.
People today have no idea just how far compilers like gcc have come, and how good they are *now* at optimizing code compared to the early days. Back around, 1988, you'd write & compile something in C, it would crash, and you'd spend hours just trying to figure out whether it crashed because *you* did something wrong, the compiler did something wrong, or AmigaDOS/Intuition had a bug (all 3 of which were equally-plausible, often jointly).
In contrast, I can clearly remember that C compilers for DOS (from MS
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I used Pascal and then Delphi for hobby stuff, mainly because unlike C or other languages the variable names were case insensitive. Also, I learned it from a book and in school, might as well use it. I never made anything complicated though.
Now I mainly use bash, php and sometimes C, but recently I made a small program with Delphi to have a GUI program (and not CLI or web) and to remember it.
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I used TP to do all kind of cool stuff, terminate and stay resident programs, programs driving the screen directly (much faster than DOS subroutines) and also large business programs. You could easily integrate assembly into it, even harcoding the hex bytes in the turbo pascal stuff.
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I remember taking Pascal in school, after I had been using other languages, and the teacher said my project was incomplete because I did not include pseudocode...
My reply to them was that Pascal pretty much was pseudo code and I did not know how much more simple or clear I could make it
That said, it was a very usable language and provided a lot of direct application with pl/sql, which was based on ada a descendant of pascal
Mem'ries, Amirite? (Score:2)
Fast and effective (Score:1)
I wrote some minor research programs in Pascal on a HP1000 minicomputer. They needed like 20 minutes to compile what I did in seconds with TP3. To that the error messages in the HP were cryptic. I ended up writing and test my programs in TP back home in the evening and type them into HP1000 the next morning. Much more effective.
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Me too! Do the assignment in TP, port to whatever was needed on the backend.
I was a grader in college, I wrote my own grade book software in Turbo Pascal. Professors was amazed at the advanced "technology", only knowing VAX 11/780s and the Vomit Making System.
Good thing it's turbo (Score:2)
If it was only alpha that would be one level lower [imgur.com]
Z/80 was the best (Score:2)
In school we had Z80 cards in our Apple ][e's with CP/M and Broderbund Turbo Pascal in slot one of the dual-disk floppy drives.
Plenty of RAM to teach CS without real compiler and language limitations.
Nothing would take more than a few seconds to compile so it was good for iteration.
A distant memory (Score:2)
In 1982 I unboxed my MCS-512 (Milwaukee Computer Systems) computer. This was heaven: 2 360K floppies, 64K of memory. I hooked up my ADDs 3a terminal and ... huh, how do I put the floppy in? My last programming had been remoting to a mainframe in 1973, and before that punch cards to an IBM Model 30-8 where we fed the cards in ourselves.. I called them up, they told me, I put the start floppy in, and up came the USCD Pascal operating system OK, a new language, Pascal. Good: should be fun.
To all you younglings 'round here (Score:5, Insightful)
And the simplicity, I remember previously having to install and run separately for MS (all with their own licenses of course): the editor, the compiler, the linker, the debugger, the runtime engine, etc, etc... which would get into hundreds of dollars before you could say 'Hello World!'.
And the IDE was great and fast and didn't require much memory. Everything was command line before that.
Case in point in 93 in Antarctica I wrote a satellite communication program to download and display graphical weather maps from NOAA satellites. Then 20 years later on another mission I happened to pass through the same Antarctic outpost. I saw the program still running, in a VM. And they were like "It runs great but there's a small bug, files aren't sorted properly after Y2K."
The IDE was still installed in the VM, so I dove in and changed the one line with the bug, it brought back a lot of good times.
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And it was a great dialect - especially at 6.0 where you had true OOP and Turbo Vision. And the compile speed was insane.
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>> For 40-odd dollars you could get the entire thing, and not have to pay for EVERY executable you produced
I suspect a lot of early DOS shareware/freeware was written in Turbo Pascal for that very reason.
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(*) and one of the last, because after that, every other one felt like an overpriced bloated piece of shit.
FWIW - Had IDE on Apple II, LISA assembler (Score:2)
Turbo Pascal truly was revolutionary. First in terms of price. For 40-odd dollars you could get the entire thing, and not have to pay for EVERY executable you produced. Yes, that was still a thing at the time. Even as a student it was afforadable. And it came with two large and very good books about pascal programming.
Absolutely. Add fast as it was compiled to native binary as opposed to BASIC.
And the IDE was great and fast and didn't require much memory. Everything was command line before that.
For high level code. For low level code on the Apple II we had the LISA assembler. It offered an IDE. It also parsed your code as you typed. So you would get an error message for a syntax error as you hit enter for the line.
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To all you younglings 'round here
Don't worry. There are none here. This site has become so niche at this point, the only folk regularly visiting are 35yo+. And even then, those that visit in that age bracket, it's only of a particular mindset. The greybeards and the Luddites quickly ran off all the folks who are working on "new" projects. People who worked on GNOME used to visit this place and now they wouldn't come here if a gun was held to their head. People who worked on a lot of various FOSS projects have received so much hate an
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"People who worked on GNOME used to visit this place and now they wouldn't come here if a gun was held to their head."
Given that Gnome is brought systemd down upon us all and the general hate for that here, I can understand why the GNOME devs wouldn't be so public about their involvement....
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I used to be one of the regulars. But Slashdot has lost the charming (to me) anarchy it once had. It was uncensored to the point where pretty insulting content up to swastika ASCII art only got modded down rather than deleted. This is no longer the case.
Today Slashdot is a semi-moderated forum like many others. And the headlines chosen by the editors are frequently clickbait and duplicates. That is indeed a thing which Phoronix does way better.
I'm here for the first time in months, discovered a few articles
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Fully agree. I was just starting out in programming then, had a good handle on BASIC, 8088 assembly language, etc., but couldn't afford the MS licensing :-( Turbo Pascal gave it all to me, esp. the easy integration of assembly language when you really needed the tightness or speed. Loved it, did some wonderful stuff in TP. Thanks, Phil, ever so much!
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I remember the first few years it was buggy, sometimes randomly crashing without warning or clues. Granted, I can't rule out programming mistakes, but if that's the case, it should "crash" in a more civilized way, including giving more trouble-shooting clues. I tried to avoid pointer-based objects, so I don't think it was bad pointer logic.
Good enough for most student work, but not ready for anything important.
Took me back 30 years... (Score:3)
Took me back over 3 decades - to the world of RegisterBGIDriver, RegisterBGIFont, and InitGraph... Went back to browse the programs I had written in college that were lying in one corner of my NAS... Panicked when TP7.zip was password protected (and the password long forgotten), but found an unencrypted copy... I have probably not touched them for 25 years other than to transfer the backups from one HDD to the other, but now I will be messing with these using virtualbox the next few days!
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> Panicked when TP7.zip was password protected
Your phone is probably capable of cracking that password in under 5 seconds.
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Takes more than 5 seconds to click through ads in the OS (WTF...) while non-spy phones like PinePhone still have seriously bad UI. Thus the CPU being in theory capable of doing the cracking task fail that because of waste reasons.
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Turbo Pascal ... (Score:2)
... was my primary introduction to PC level programming (besides submitting decks of cards punched with Fortran programs in college). Rubbing elbows with people who were learning on various flavors of Basic, it was evident that the structure inherent in Pascal would go a long way toward learning good programming practices. The latter just resulted in spaghetti code (the output a few well disciplined developers excepted).
LOL Nostalgia day (Score:2)
My Foray into Programming (Score:2)
My First Professional Language (Score:4, Interesting)
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Who cares for which programming language is used? (Score:4, Insightful)
The first programming language you learn is hard because you learn programming at the same time. And then you love it because you succeed with learning this. But once you've learned it you can only think that one is really better than others when you never bother to learn another one.
So Turbo Pascal was great just because it took so much of bothersome technical stuff out of programming.
But of course at some point things slowly and almost without you noticing it turn around and you have to invest more time into learning the IDE than to understand what programming actually is. IDE's are the solution to, and the source of, all problems with programming...
Once in a while you really need to go back to the roots and program with nothing but an editor and a language you have to learn and never used before. Only then you can even begin to understand where an IDE is helpful or actually a mountain you have to climb just to arrive somewhere to get even the smallest thing done.
By the way this is the reason I always will love Unix shell scripts. It's a very limited language but it is so well and deeply integrated with the OS that you can get real and useful things done with very little effort at all. You can, and soon will, start to write simple but very useful programs right at the prompt.
These days you have people calling themselves programmers who in the worst case can't even program but just know how their IDE works.
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Only then you can even begin to understand where an IDE is helpful or actually a mountain you have to climb just to arrive somewhere to get even the smallest thing done
I teach embedded Linux programming. The practical training starts with makefiles and cross-compiling. Then it shows how to configure Eclipse to do that. But it's not required (only working code gives them points). Last week a team of students spent 3 hours to configure Eclipse out of the 4 for the assignment... No blinking LED Gpios for those...
Makefiles are fine, but my fave IDEs historically are: Turbo Pascal, LabWindows/CVI and now I'm just learning CLion and it's pretty straightforward. But there are
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And about Perl, I wrote in Perl for a year, as clean as I could, and every time, a few weeks later, I couldn't understand what I had written. And incidentally I hate the Perl motto about many ways to do one thing. I just means you can't understand what somebody else wrote. Never again.
Pascal at Stanford (Score:1)
used it for production code (Score:1)
Wrote construction estimating program in TP that had some features our group wanted that Means Estimating didn't have, about 20K lines in late 1980s
I remember using Turbo Pascal (Score:2)
I took a Pascal programming course at a junior college, and I used Turbo Pascal for the assignments. And yes it was lightning FAST for it's day. Also easy to use for the time since you could do a lot of things like code/compile/run in the same environment.
What about UCSD Pascal (Score:3)
On the apple ][+
It came with the "Language Card" (16K of RAM)
and the Jensen and Wirth manual
Bought Turbo C (Score:2)
Forget Pascal, I bought Turbo C and learned C after a very short introduction to Turbo Pascal.
I didn't want to spend a lot of time learning a language that wasn't much used outside of academia, and someone I knew in the industry recommended C.
Turbo C was a great product and a good learning experience. Complete with memory corruption and crashing.
Pascal was too much like training wheels.
I used it; many thanks (Score:2)
I enjoyed using it, way back. :-)
Many thanks to Turbo [fandom.com] for creating it.
Wrote my thesis in it. (Score:2)
Wrote my Master's Theses in Turbo Pascal for DOS. It was an IDE system for a hardware design language, synthesis and simulation (including a custom compiler in TP). It was a blast to use the object oriented programming for the first time. I wrote the actual thesis book in WordPerfect for DOS and that was pain.
Hell yeah I remember... (Score:2)
College, 1987 and once in career (Score:2)
Our college Data Structures and Algorithms lab was in Turbo Pascal on PC. We wrote stacks, queues, linked-lists etc - much fun. It was an enormous improvement over our previous FORTRAN labs on terminals talking to a Honeywell CP6 mainframe.
Later I worked on a project in the early 2000's and the chief technical person from our US partner was huge on Delphi and OOP. That was a Delphi-CORBA-Java system.
MacPascal (Score:3)
"Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?"
I had my first Macintosh in the Spring of 1984, and somehow a beta version of MacPascal was given to me. It later came out as an official release. It was a GUI IDE with debugger running an interpreter, doing 96-bit floating point. This evolved into an even more-capable IDE with compiler and linker and was called THINK Pascal. I used this for many years on a Mac II (80-bit floating point in Motorola hardware FPU). Eventually, this went away and I switched to Codewarrior Pascal which required a bit of recoding and emulating THINK Pascal's graphics window. When Codewarrior dropped support for Pascal, I was looking at yet another re-write to some other dialect of Pascal. Instead, I switched to Ada which I use to this day as my main language. (My work is technical calculations in signal processing—audio and radar). Had I known of the long-term viability of Free Pascal Compiler at the time of switching to Ada, I likely would have stuck with Pascal. But Ada is a lovely language IMHO and I have no regrets. Julia currently serves my small, one-off projects.
Ah yes, time to feel old (Score:2)
Damn... I remember using TurboPascal for an Apple... IIe I think? I just remember having to implement an odd solution to get a random number because it didn't include a random number function naively.
AP CS and College (Score:2)
In the 85-86 school year, I took AP Computer Science, which was based on Pascal at the time. I had done a ton of programming in Atari BASIC and a touch of 6502 assembly, but this was my first real programming class. We had some old Cromemco computers, but switched to PCjrs with Turbo Pascal halfway through the year, and it was vastly better. Later in college, we used Turbo Pascal in most of the classes until we learned C using Turbo C. I liked it so much that I bought my own copy.
High school and college (Score:1)
My high school teacher said I could do my CS projects in Turbo Pascal rather than have to use the school's CP/M system (UCSD p-code for those who remember). My parents agreed to buy it for me. The convenience realized cannot be described in a /. post.
A few years later, my college CS professor said I could do my CS projects on Turbo C rather than use the school's Lisas. As with Turbo Pascal, the ability to quickly iterate through code corrections without swapping floppies (separate compiler and linker) is a
BEFORE Pascal (Score:2)
Many years and other languages latter, including PDP-8 assembler and Fortran. I jumped at the chance to buy a copy of Turbo Pascal for my AT&T 6300 DOS computer.
To my surprise I met an old friend. To me Turbo Pascal was for most things ALGOL 60 with a new name and a few differences, but basically it was ALGOL. Your mileage may vary.
Nikolas Worth's original Pascal compiler (Score:2)
I had the privilege of using Nikolas Worth's original Pascal compiler written for the Control Data 6000-series supercomputers from the mid-1960's. Well, not the first version of it but one of its revisions (bug fixes and such). This would have been in the mid-1980's. It was a very nice compiler, written, of course, in Pascal and it was pretty fast. The compiler, however, did not generate object code that would allow you to debug programs using the operating system's interactive debugger for reasons I ne
Re: (Score:3)
Please, grant Niklaus Wirth his correct name.
I had the "honor" of following a course by him (digital design), a bit after already having had courses where the successors to Pascal, i.e. Modula-2 and Oberon (on Wirth's Ceres boxen), were used. Whereas Pascal was procedural only, Modula-2 was "modular" and Oberon object-oriented.
Earlier, Pascal was my first post-BASIC language, indeed using Turbo Pascal and BGI. I recall implementing Mandelbrot with exponents higher than 2, running several hours per picture o
Great little IDE (Score:1)
I used Turbo Pascal version 4 or 5 as a contractor on a government site in the late 1980s. That IDE made me so much more productive than the command line compilers of the day. Being taken immediately to your syntax error so you could fix it and recompile at the touch of a button spoiled me. I also liked the fact that you could have the default runtime error checking to find more subtle errors and then disable that checking to speed your program up after those errors had been found. I moved from that bac
I remember it like it was .....Now. (Score:2)
First off, it was Turbo Pascal until version 4. Then it was Borland Pascal. BP 5.5 and 7.0 were incredibly easy to develop applications with. The beta diskettes that Delphi came out on were labeled "AppBuilder". And Delphi is still around, still being used. I know this because my primary development languages are Object Pascal, Java, Javascript, and C#. In fact, I picked up TP 3.01b in college and I've been using Pascal and Object Pascal ever since. I still have install disks for every version... in
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Borland Pascal was the professional version of Turbo Pascal 7.0.
To this day I still have the manual (Score:2)
Turbo Pascal was my first real language... (Score:2)
Its possible I had limited exposure to Basic or something prior to this but Turbo Pascal was the first language I actually did any serious programming in. I still have some of my old Turbo Pascal code (including some graphical stuff) although the effort to get it compiled and running again wouldn't be worth it.
Unlike some on here I didn't actually buy it, it was something a family member had bought and I was using it.
Turbo Pascal was also the first language I was exposed to in my high-school programming cla
The base of my professional career (Score:2)
Huh (Score:2)
I wrote my A-Level computer science project in Turbo Pascal 3. Ran to about 1500 lines. It was a trivial physics database with expert system.
Turbo Pascal 4 came out partway through writing, but I stayed on 3 because it supported generic data types, which I'd used extensively in file I/O to avoid having to write a save function for each record type.
That's not really remarkable (Score:2)
"I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal."
Once upon a time, teaching intro to programming entirely in Pascal was the standard way to do things. Forget Turbo Pascal, anybody here remember UCSD Pascal?
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When I started college our class was the first to use turbo pascal, v2 IIRC, other classes where using ucsd pascal. So plenty of items were available but in UCSD pascal which us freshmen had to translate.
When was Turbo Pascal 7 released as freeware? (Score:2)
The summary claims that Turbo Pascal 7 was released as freeware. When was that? And where can I get it?
As far as I know, only Turbo Pascal 5.5 was ever released thus, and there only the command line compiler, not the IDE.
(And later ther was Turbo Delphi which was also free for a while.)
Re: (Score:1)
And there is also Lazarus (Delphi clone) (Score:3)
Surprised no one mentioned it yet: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [lazarus-ide.org] ... You can create your own open source or commercial applications. With Lazarus you can create file browsers, image viewers, database applications, graphics editing software, games, 3D software, medical analysis software or any other type of software. ... Lazarus has a huge community of people supporting each other. It include scientists and students, pupils and teachers, professionals and hobbyists. Our wiki provides tutorials, documentation and ideas. Our forums and mailing-list offer a space to ask questions and talk to users and the developers."
"Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development. It has variety of components ready for use and a graphical form designer to easily create complex graphical user interfaces.
It is a cross-platform system that has been around for over twenty years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Anyway, circa 1996-2000, I co-developed (with my wife) three applications in Delphi Pascal (a garden simulator, a text-adventure authoring tool, and a 3D botanical plant creation tool). Earlier versions were done in C++ and also Smalltalk. For the time, Delphi has much faster compiles than C++. And in general Object Pascal was easier to work with than C++, especially for my wife who had learned Pascal in school but did not know C well. And Smalltalk applications back then were problematical to distribute including due to run-time fees. Links to those three applications are here, with source on my GitHub site.
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com... [kurtz-fernhout.com]
I had been looking at Lazarus in its early years to port that code from Windows to Linux, but ultimately I never pursued that approach.
I ported one of those programs a few years ago to TypeScript. I prefer using a language with garbage collection when possible. I used a conversion tool I wrote to do some of the heavy lifting by parsing the Delphi code, but there was also a lot of hand editing involved. I never release the source for the tool because I was not sure of the licensing for the Delphi grammars I adapted. Some changes were also needed to the UI to map easily onto a web page.
https://github.com/pdfernhout/... [github.com]
https://github.com/pdfernhout/... [github.com]
I hope to port the other two applications to TypeScript someday as well. But, I still might consider just porting them to Lazarus which is a much easier lift than such a port -- especially now that Lazarus can generate applications for the web.
https://wiki.lazarus.freepasca... [freepascal.org]
All that said, given Squeak's emergence, I kinda wish I had stuck with Smalltalk for those projects, especially as my wife liked it. Or alternatively, maybe just soldiered on with C or C++ given its portability and prevalence and continued improvements too (which opens up other opportunities). Or even just get really good at Forth? :-)
Delphi was nicer than C++ and faster than Smalltalk, but it is risky and usually limiting to tie your projects to a single vendor's proprietary language and libraries. Lazarus changed the game on that though for Delphi eventually too though, but Lazarus took years to get really good -- and in the meantime Java improved and then JavaScript/TypeScript improved (both of which I ended up doing a lot of coding in).
Anyway, great now to have many good choices nowadays (including for many other languages) of free software development systems that are cross-platform.
high school (Score:2)
In 1984 Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC with DOS was pretty awesome. For its time, nothing was better. I was sorry to see t
Fond memories! (Score:1)
When I was in college earning my BSCS, I programmed FORTRAN, LISP and Pascal on a CP/M Ferguson Big Board based computer for classwork.
Then I got an Apple II+ and used Apple Pascal which was a huge leap forward with graphics (which annoyed hell out of the TAs when I used those in my projects for some reason). Then it was out into the real world and several machine control projects written on a PC with Turbo Pascal.
Later I went to work for a company that wrote software for commercial loan servicing that use