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Comment by eckyptang | Hacker News Reader

I was thrown at turbo Pascal at university. Horrible language to be honest as it was utterly painful to produce any reasonable data structures in it. The verbosity usually broke the memory constraints of the machine just before you finished what you were doing meaning hours of search and replace on identifiers to shorten them to clean up ram for the editor. Ick.

It made me actually long to get back to a m68k based sun 3 with a c compiler which took literally 2 minutes to compile hello world if some asshat wasn't running emacs on the same box which was swapping to disk 100% of the time...

However what they managed to cram in was impressive.

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Hmm, I don't have that experience; TP worked well for me and I created quite substantial commercial projects which made me a 'wealthy' student in university. Especially when they introduced overlays we were able to use all those kilobytes :) I have good experiences with it and I still have all the sources of the software I wrote then (a lot of it is still sold and a lot I ported to Delphi after that and is still sold). Do you have concrete examples of what you are referring to? I used structures, but never too complex as I came from assembler (Z80/68k) and didn't (and don't) really see the use of very complex structures. Reasonable worked fine.

That Sun workstation probably had multiple megabytes of RAM and cost 4x more than a fully loaded PC. The 68k had a flat 32-bit address space and even virtual memory.

TP was heroic for what it could do in the 16-bit segemented x86 architecture in well under 640k of RAM. It was the first high level language implementation that made "real" developers consider using something other than hand-coded asm.

12mb :) It cost more but the time to market was much lower and it was multi user so I think the trade off on cost was quite good.

apart fron the editoe problems, It was used to write a control program for a cnc mill which talked to an Isa card that controlled stepper motors. The program took a basic description of the part to be milled and converted it into tool movement steps. this was all 2d but the parts were quite complicated as were the calculations. Tool movements is what killed it. We started with a list of lists structure but that took up too much ram so we moved to a skip list implementation. That also took too much ram so it was back to a singly linked list and an external preprocessor. So it turned from an elegant tool into a few chunks of ugly which had to be chained. That really doesn't work well on DOS. This was before EMS etc so 640k of segmented vomit it was. It was moved to a dedicated 68k SBC eventually with the ui in turbo pascal (over a serial line) which worked well and we could throw 4mb at it and write the control program in c using a cross compiler on unix (plus no segments=bliss).

I love 32+ bits these days :)

As I recall it, when TP came out on the it meant that you no longer had to choose between Basic and 16 bit segmented mode asm.

Not many people had heard of C back then and Pascal was considered a very well-designed language. The PC C compilers of the time were somewhat lousy. Few people doing PC development had access to a proper *NIX machine.

You had a choice between several types of C compiler: lousy, expensive, or lousy and expensive!

When Linux came out I was kind of stunned you got gcc thrown in like it was no big deal.

I also used Turbo Pascal at university (around '90 / '91), and while I can remember some growing pains in terms of learning to program I can't recall any such problems that you experienced. My memory is fuzzy on the detail, but I think there was a time in the mid -> late 80s where Turbo Pascal was greatly improved, and become close to the Object Pascal language which is still in use today. I'd be guessing you were using the 'pre-improvements' version of TP. I have to admit, I have a soft-spot for Object Pascal, and still use it fairly often (in a project for a long-standing client; the software was originally developed in TP, and was eventually moved to Delphi 7 which is what I use for maintenance to this day).

If you think Turbo Pascal was bad, you should have seen what we used before TP came out -- the UCSD Pascal p-system. Ugh... compared to that, Turbo Pascal was a pure delight to use.

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