Turbo Rascal Syntax Error | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Rascal Syntax Error

lemonspawn.com

203 points658142 comments

Am I the only one who read it as "Raz-kal" rather than "Raskuhl"

Isn't that the right way, going back to the greatest compact dev env ever, turbo pascal!

Liam Neeson from "Batman Begins" approves of this pronunciation.

I almost found it insulting. But then I noticed the a.

It's obviously named after the relatively obscure 18th century Swiss scientist Blasé Rascal (not to be confused with the much better known 17th century French scientist Blaise Pascal).

Poor me, in doubt, I DuckDuckGo'ed "Blasé Rascal" :-)

Hi there, and thanks for all the comments / interest in TRSE! Even though the name was chosen back in 2018 just for fun, I hope that you guys are having a blast trying out the various systems & tutorials that are currently supported in the IDE. Instead of discussing whether TRSE is a good/bad name, how about making a demo about it instead?

Its really only with modern cross-compiling tool chains that "high level" languages like C or Pascal are close to competitive with writing in assembler for old 8-bit systems. Part of this is the machine target is so constrained. The 6502 (motivating and original target of the TRSE compiler) is particularly difficult.

While the 6502 has a machine call stack, it is only 256 bytes and does not allow any stack-pointer-relative operations. This is unsuitable for local variable storage of "stack frames" for recursive function calls.

Also the 6502 is a pure 8 bit processor (all registers and operations are single byte) except for the program counter, which is 16 bits. There are no registers usable as pointers, and limited hardware support for "indirect" operations thru a memory-stored pointer.

Projects like TRSE are quite amazing for opening up a lot more possibilities for what can be done in a higher level language but with near-assembler-level performance.

> 6502 does not allow any stack-pointer-relative operations

Almost not true. All you have to do is add the TSX instruction, which moves stack pointer into X register, then use absolute indexed addressing mode in which address of the memory operand is computed by adding together the absolute address specified in the instruction and the X register value. For example the instructions `TSX; LDA $0105, X` will load into A the byte in the stack which is 5 bytes up from the stack pointer. Cost for this is being unable to use the X register for something else. Addition also doesn't wrap around the stack page.

reminded me of one of my all-time favorite demos from Future Crew one of the moments that shaped my childhood towards a life of computers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTjnt_WSJu8

Latest TRSE updates from Nicolaas Ervik Groeneboom

https://www.facebook.com/groups/742955836046459/user/8500553...

Dumb question (since I'm writing an emulator for the Appel2 :-)) : who does use it ?

amazing that embarcadero and intel haven't come down on them for trademark violations. but perhaps it's so niche they don't care. and who on earth thought that "Turbo Rascal Syntax Error" was a good name?

> and who on earth thought that "Turbo Rascal Syntax Error" was a good name?

Well it's certainly memorable, and doesn't seem to have any collisions when searching for it on e.g. DuckDuckGo, so I'd say it's good enough as a name.

Worse yet, the full name appears to be: Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN”

I had a good laugh at least =)

I'm bothered by the missing closing quote around the full title.

> DuckDuckGo

A lousy name IMO

Well it's certainly memorable, and doesn't seem to have any collisions when searching for it on e.g. DuckDuckGo, so I'd say it's good enough as a name.

It’s DuckDuckGoose but limited to ten characters.

So it’s like only getting three seasons of Buffy?

To me it seems like turbo pascal is no longer a valid trademark[1], or am I missing something?

I like it at least. I used turbo pascal, turbo c/c++ and tasm quite a lot in my youth for this sort of stuff :)

[1] https://trademarks.justia.com/736/24/turbo-73624203.html

interesting. typical of embarcadero. but trse does seem to have pirated the intel inside logo design.

I feel like I must be missing something. I read the submitted web page and watched the "promo" video, and didn't see anything that mentioned Intel or even remotely resembled the "Intel Inside" logo.

Where are you seeing a connection?

https://retrogamecoders.com/introduction-to-trse-programming...

From what I can find the trademark for the logo with the arcs is abandoned/expired but the phrase “intel inside” is current. It doesn’t really matter anyways unless Intel wants to send a takedown notice so why do we care?

Not sure pastiche counts as piracy..

That trademark is only for the term "Turbo pascal" on a printed reference manaual for a computer program.

It probably wouldn't have applied here anyway, but maybe there are other (more generic) turbo pascal or even "turbo ProgrammingLanguage" trademarks?

Turbo C and Turbo Prolog existed (I briefly used both in early 1990s).

Yes. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35858954 where I point to a few, as well as for "Turbo".

You want https://trademarks.justia.com/734/69/turbo-73469354.html for Turbo Pascal. It is still active.

USTPO's TESS says "IC 009. US 038. G & S: Computer Programs Used as an Aid in Developing Computer Programs Employing Pascal Language. FIRST USE: 19831100. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19831100" and "(LAST LISTED OWNER) CODEGEAR LLC LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY DELAWARE 10801 N. Mopac Expy., Bld. 1, Ste. 100 Austin TEXAS 78759"

Your [1] is "(CANCELLED) IC 016. US 038. G & S: MANUALS FOR COMPUTER PROGRAMS. FIRST USE: 19831100. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19831100", also with CODEGEAR LLC as the last listed owner.

Turbo C is https://trademarks.justia.com/735/26/turbo-c-73526835.html - "(CANCELLED) IC 009. US 038. G & S: COMPUTER PROGRAMS AND INSTRUCTION MANUALS ASSOCIATED THEREWITH. FIRST USE: 19850226. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19850226", with "Cancellation Date: June 24, 2006" Owner was Borland.

Turbo Prolog is 73576691, owned by Borland, cancelled August 23, 1993.

Turbo Assembler is 73526834, owned by Borland, cancelled July 8, 2006.

"Turbo" is 74105045, "computer software; namely, adaptations of Pascal, C, Assembler and other programming languages and tools and utilities for creating application programs"

Having encountered the project before, I immediately knew what "Turbo Rascal"/TRSE was, though I forgot what TRSE stood for.

I consider it good quirky branding.

The problem with the name is that I thought it was going to be something entirely different. The genius of the name is that I clicked the link.

But I thought it was a debugging story about old software and that "Rascal" was a slight at Borland's expense or a typo. Either way, I like old software and I like debugging stories.

To my surprise this is a very cool IDE for building software (games/demos) for 8/16-bit computers of yesteryear.

> who on earth thought that "Turbo Rascal Syntax Error" was a good name

Me. I absolutely adore it.

Cheeky humor, fun, old-school. Perfect for a retro programming project that helps you make 8/16 bit games.

Hmm, yeah... Borland/Embarcadero isn't exactly selling Turbo Pascal, but it does come up as a live trademark registration: https://uspto.report/TM/73469354 so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They might have already changed the name. It's TRSE. Near the top they call it the "full original name".

Sometimes "original name" means old name.

Either way I think they're prepared to change it to TRSE if they need to.

> who on earth thought that "Turbo Rascal Syntax Error" was a good name?

raises hand it’s fun! I’m not even remotely its target audience but I very much appreciate the name.

"Turbo Rascal Syntax Error" is a great name, especially since it can be read in trochaic tetrameter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochaic_tetrameter

https://xkcd.com/1412/

TRSI is a giant widely known demogroup. The similarity of abbreviations tells the initiated that the author is probably not alien to the demoscene. Links, target systems, and overall aesthetics of the project support that conclusion.

https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=280&order=release

https://demozoo.org/groups/69/

Adding a random link to the mix: https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=12155

Actually the full name is “Turbo Rascal Syntax error, “;” expected but “BEGIN” - and I wonder if the unmatched quotation marks are another in-joke (but I doubt it, because strings in Pascal actually use single quotes). I would have used "begin expected but { found" instead (an error that someone used to C-like languages might encounter - OTOH, this isn't really realistic, because a Pascal parser would treat any "{...}" block as a comment).

I fired up Turbo Pascal 7.0 and the compiler says 'Error 85: ";" expected.' if you continue your "program xyz" declaration with a newline and type "begin" without a semicolon in-between; I think this is the setup for triggering the error message.

Does anyone know which version had the verbose form?

The error is from Free Pascal, e.g. Error: Syntax error, ";" expected but "BEGIN" found. Delphi (at least Delphi 2 which i have here) has a similar error but without the "Syntax Error" part and uses single quotes, e.g. ';' expected but 'BEGIN' found.

I love the name. What’s wrong with it?

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