3 ms·
It is so cool to hear everyone else's stories about their first programming jobs in Turbo Pascal. Keep them coming! (Not so) Interesting side story: The menu
by cyberferret 10y ago
It is so cool to hear everyone else's stories about their first programming jobs in Turbo Pascal. Keep them coming!
(Not so) Interesting side story: The menu system I talk about in my post above - I actually wrote a full screen editor for it, because I was sick of using EDLIN to edit batch files etc. all the time. My editor was I believe one of the first ones I had seen which let you use cursor keys to move around the screen, and it let you edit a mammoth 255 lines of DOS batch code(!) :)
But it had ONE crucial bug that I never fixed - if you edited a line, you had to cursor off it or press [Enter] at the end of the line for it to commit your changes from the change buffer to the in memory copy of the file, so if you saved the batch file without doing this, your last changes would not get saved.
To this day, more than 3 decades later. No matter what editor I am using (Sublime/Atom/VS Code etc.), that behaviour is ingrained in my psyche, and even if I make a single line change in my source code, I reflexively cursor OFF that line or press [Enter] before I hit 'save'...
- smitchell2 10y agoBack in 1984, I purchased Turbo Pascal 2, and had several decent contracts writing various sorts of software. In 1985 I wrote a simple programmers text editor in it (I really had no idea what I was doing - I learned as I went along), and released it as shareware. Folks started sending me checks, and by 1988 I had to hire staff to help me process and ship orders, do tech support, and so on. We peaked at 15 employees in the mid-90's. While I eventually converted everything to C, I still have very fond memories of Turbo Pascal. Those were the days!