Rediscovering Turbo Pascal | Hacker News Reader

Rediscovering Turbo Pascal

journal.paoloamoroso.com

68 pointsAlexeyBrin16 comments

At the time of the release of Turbo Pascal 3.x, the IDE's on the CP/M version and MS-DOS version were almost identical. I suspect that the author was using TP 4.x or later on MS-DOS.

Turbo Pascal on CP/M was a sweet spot among the development tools of the day. As the author describes, the IDE was very pleasant to use, compile-times were speedy, the generated code was compact, and the language implementation permitted a nice mix of high-level constructs with low-level access.

I think there's a lot of us that got spoiled by the TP IDE. It was night and day more productive than the contemporary environments (particularly on CP/M). Other Pascal (and other) compilers might have been 'better' in some ways, but noone really had the edit->compile->fix workflow in one mostly seemless, easy to use package.

Author here. Yes, on MS-DOS I used Turbo Pascal versions later than 4.

You might enjoy the rabbit hole my friend dug into when he created TRSE: https://lemonspawn.com/

A language (Turbo Rascal Syntax Error), inspired by turbo pascal, that compiles to many of the old processors, including C64 etc.

Turbo Pascal compiled on the native hardware though.

Turbo Pascal was my first "real" language. Not CP/M, but Macintosh, ha ha.

I was recently able to recover some games I wrote in the late 80's, early 90's and to get some of them to function correctly I had to re-learn Pascal. That too was a rabbit hole.

Also the first real programming language I learned, on an early version of DOS (3.?). I wrote a utility to encode data which was burnt to Eeproms for VHF radio's (fixed base units) I don't remember the details but it was cool to write a tool to solve a problem. Fun times.

Same here - I still have my Turbo Pascal 5.0 install disks!

same. I even have my first disk of turbo pascal programs, written by my grandad, on github: https://github.com/byronka/turbopascal

I've had a lot of fun with Turbo Pascal over recent years. Simple single-board computers are easily available from tindie, etc, and even without that there are a lot of CP/M emulators out there.

I hacked up a simple emulator in golang for mac/linux/bsd - https://github.com/skx/cpmulator/ and there's a link to a set of binaries for turbo pascal, and instructions for using it available here:

https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist/tree/master/P

There's a highly related post on the front-page right now is about building your own Z80 computer, which would be ideal for running CP/M and thus Turbo Pascal!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41398629

Pascal is still kicking around in the modern realm: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I remember being an early teenager on IRC and joining a small BBS development team. I said I knew Pascal, but that was a fib... I did learn it quickly, though, and used it for many years. I can still find the code online, and see my contribution which I get a kick out of... It was a tool that you entered colored ascii frames for an animated "press any key to continue" prompt, and it output a valid pascal function file for that animation.

Turbo Pascal was a fantastic language for the time. However it was exclusive to Borland so other companies won by using standard C and C++, which could compile code for several machines and OSs, and avoided lock up to a single company (Borland).

Turbo Pascal wasn't a language; it was a product, an IDE.

The language was Pascal, and there were compilers (and I suppose IDEs) available from other vendors besides Borland.

So no lock-in. (Well, not on the language itself. If you used too many of Borland's extensions to it, then it took a while for other vendors to catch up. But AFAICR and AIUI, many of them did, after a while; Borland set kind of an "extended" or "industry" standard.)

Took me a moment to parse “readbale” correctly. ;)

Author here. LOL fixed, thanks.

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