Pascal will always have my heart. My first bridge outside Basic (I was stuck with a home pc so didn’t go down the assembly rabbit hole like others of my generation). Turbo Pascal’s IDE. Add it possible for a kid to learn and create in a way I never would have done if stuck with a collection of semi independent tools. for those who say just use the command line - this was 1989. DOS was not exactly today’s modern shell environment!
Same here! Very fond memories. I used Turbo Pascal 3.3 under CP/M on the Microbee but found it a bit hard and cumbersome to use. But when I discovered TP5 on MS-DOS I was blown away! This was coming from writing BASIC and batch files.
I purchased Turbo Pascal 3 for Amstrad CPC 6128 with my pocket money back in 1989(?). That was 1000 FF back then (~275€ today) so quite a big sum for a teenager. My dad took pity on me and funded 50% of it. Best investment ever!
Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally compute 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC).
I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind.
It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).
How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32 LCD and a piezo buzzer. Serial and parallel ports available and a FDD. It also has a ROM card slot. And a card was developed, the only third-party ROM for this platform, by one Hans Larsson in Sweden, in the late 1980s.
A 64k ROM with:
- a mostly TP 5.5 compatible Pascal compiler, crt and friends
- inline assembly
- units, loadable libraries and all
- debugger
- full-screen editor, global search and replace, etc.
- visual file manager
- CLI with redirection and rudimentary shell scripting - variables, conditionals, arguments
While the hardware platform is somewhat available and there is a very good emulator, due to "issues", the DL-Pascal ROM is not at this time publicly available and only a chosen few have access to it. Luckily there is a preservation effort underway.
Is it right to say that Borland basically invented the IDE? I didn't use Turbo Pascal but did have a copy of Turbo C back in the day and that was certainly the first IDE-like programming environment I can remember.
I just dug up TP v3.01 from 1983. Not sure I have a working 5-1/4 floppy drive to tell if the disk is any good... Programming with TP brings back fun times!
Turbo Pascal's IDE was my first glimpse into debugging beyond strategically place print statements.
It was a game changer. Imagine single stepping through your code and inspecting your variables!
I had Turbo Pascal 2.0, back screen with yellow letters on DOS, didn't get the blue Borland IDE until a few years later, and I also had Microsoft QuickPascal. Wasn't 100% compatible with the games/graphics "tutes" of the time though.
But, I ended up switching to Turbo C for the 'cool' factor, but in reality TP was a better way to go about what I was using it for.
22 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] threadThis website is full of goodies for anyone that cares about history of Niklaus Wirth created languages.
https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html
Vim looks pathetic in comparison to it...
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
The distribution of Borland's Turbo Pascal v3.01A is approximately 180k.
Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally compute 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC).
I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind.
It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).
How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32 LCD and a piezo buzzer. Serial and parallel ports available and a FDD. It also has a ROM card slot. And a card was developed, the only third-party ROM for this platform, by one Hans Larsson in Sweden, in the late 1980s.
A 64k ROM with:
- a mostly TP 5.5 compatible Pascal compiler, crt and friends
- inline assembly
- units, loadable libraries and all
- debugger
- full-screen editor, global search and replace, etc.
- visual file manager
- CLI with redirection and rudimentary shell scripting - variables, conditionals, arguments
While the hardware platform is somewhat available and there is a very good emulator, due to "issues", the DL-Pascal ROM is not at this time publicly available and only a chosen few have access to it. Luckily there is a preservation effort underway.
I was truly disappointed that Turbo Pascal did not copy my handy PORT-metavariable. You can write & read IO-ports without any extra hässle:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/qeJpYb94XzLBCE139
But, I ended up switching to Turbo C for the 'cool' factor, but in reality TP was a better way to go about what I was using it for.
« I wrote Pascal for 8080 in 1976 and Finnish Army even paid some money for it.
I was truly disappointed that Turbo Pascal did not copy my handy PORT-metavariable. You can write & read IO-ports without any extra hässle: »
https://x.com/TimoNoko/status/2088526751693496346
The screenshot makes his point very well.
EDIT: oh! I see he commented downthread!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307774