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Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :)

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