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Anders Hejlsberg wrote the first mass-market Compiler+IDE with Turbo Pascal. What was unique is that TP would automatically bring up the editor and position the
by musesum 10y ago
Anders Hejlsberg wrote the first mass-market Compiler+IDE with Turbo Pascal. What was unique is that TP would automatically bring up the editor and position the cursor on the offending error. Seems trivial now, but it was a game changer for writing code on a PC. TP sold for around $49. The competitor, Pascal MT+, sold for $400.
I doubt if Anders would remember me, but I was lucky enough to be contracted by Borland to write their first test suite for TP 4.5. It was their first object oriented language. The spec was one of the most beautiful and concise pieces of technical documentation I've ever read.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoTP was indeed amazing, though I think you're misremembering — TP 5.5 was the first version to add OO extensions. It came with a separate little manual just for the object-oriented stuff (beautifully typeset with the same type of syntax flow diagrams that Apple did [1]; Borland's OO extensions came from Apple Pascal, after all), and I remember reading it from cover while on vacation when I was in my mid-teens, and having my mind blown by the ideas of object-orientation, which seemed like complete science fiction at the time. Anything from your recollections you can add to this? Was there any collaboration with Apple at all? [1] http://pascal-central.com/images/pascalposter.jpg http://pascal-central.com/images/pascalposter.jpg
- musesum 10y agoYep, my bad regarding version; was relying on faulty wetware instead of a web search. Not that I was privy to inside information; but it was a strange coincidence that Borland dropped its Basic compiler at the same time that Microsoft dropped its Pascal compiler. Apple had a pretty cool OO Pascal that somewhat resembled Xerox Parc's Mesa.
- FullyFunctional 10y agoThere were many wonderful things about TP, but it started much earlier than that. BLS Pascal on Nascom 2, COMPAS Pascal on CP/M, Turbo Pascal on CP/M, and finally TP on DOS. I met Anders at Herning Messen where he demoed COMPAS Pascal (running a Maze generator). From my recollection he was a few years older than me which suggests he wrote BLS Pascal as a young teenager o_O! This thread has a big of this history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202299
- agumonkey 10y agoLast month I recovered an old backup tape with TP.EXE. Couldn't resist but to play with it in dosbox. http://imgur.com/oT3u4fR http://imgur.com/oT3u4fR It really was a brilliant piece of software. 600KB. ps: the text GUI shadows.
- musesum 10y agoAh yes, text mode graphics! I spent a few thousand hours writing a text mode version of Augment, with TP. Amazing what you could do with 80x25x16 colors.
- Flow 10y agoI always fancied the EGA text mode of 80x43x16 colors. Much prettier than 80x50.
- agumonkey 10y agoIn terms of ergonomy, that amount of text was very nice. As a long emacs user, I felt straight jacketed by their keyboard shortcuts. ps: really, these pseudo alpha transparent text shadows ...
- atombender 10y agoTurbo Pascal 5.x and onwards were implemented using Turbo Vision, a really good, object-oriented UI framework [1]. Every view could render a sub-rectangle of itself on command into a buffer, which is how the UI was able to render drop shadows. The C++ version was open-sourced in 1997 and ported to a bunch of platforms including Linux [2]. [1] http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/html/index.html http://www.sigala.it/sergio/tvision/html/index.html [2] http://tvision.sourceforge.net/ http://tvision.sourceforge.net/
- fernly 10y agoTo assist you all in reminiscing? A lot of TP manuals are at bitsavers: http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/turbo_pascal/ http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/bor...