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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Pascal 6.0 was a fantastic programming environment for DOS. The inline assembler feature (the "asm" statement) was awesome! It allowed you to build demo scene-quality effects for the VGA while doing most of the grunt-work in high-level Pascal. This is why e.g Fast Tracker, Crystal Dreams II (Triton) and Second Reality (Future Crew) were all built in a combination of Turbo Pascal and inline asm.

IIRC Turbo Pascal 7.0 (aka Borland Pascal 7.0; I never unstood the difference) added syntax highlighting but mostly focused on adding Windows support (meh).

I wrote my first web apps as BP7 win-cgi apps back in 1995.

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I wrote a co-operative multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal 7, back in the day. I needed to be able to pipe things between a few filter routines, and it helped make everything work. In the middle of compute heavy code, you sprinkled calls to "Yield"... and it worked.

Windows support was added in Turbo Pascal for Windows.

Turbo products were the "community/student", while the Borland were the "professional" variant with more tooling and compiler optimisations.

> Turbo products were the "community/student", while the Borland were the "professional" variant with more tooling and compiler optimisations.

Ah.. Over here in northern Europe we'd typically just pirate everything from our school's installation so we weren't really aware of any marketing differences. Thanks for clearing up a long-time mystery :). (We ended up with an install that had both bp.exe/tp.exe and bpc.exe/tpc.exe, and they seemed to behave identically. bp/tp.exe was the IDE, bpc/tpc.exe was the commandline compiler.)

> Windows support was added in Turbo Pascal for Windows.

I think Turbo Pascal for Windows was like a branch, but then TP7/BP7 brought it into the mainline. Just before the mainline was reworked into what became Delphi.

Not sure about the timeline anymore, just that I bought TPW shortly after it came out.

Me neither, it was a long time ago.

In the 80's, I put a Z80 card in my Apple 2, just so I could run CP/M and Turbo Pascal. This.. wasn't that unusual.

Turbo Pascal, Wordstar, and dBase were the three killer apps that justified by buying a Z80 card for my Apple II back in the mid-80s.

TIL there there wasn't a 6502 version of Turbo Pascal, while there was a Z80 version. (And that was even the original target CPU.)

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