Remember, Wirth designed Pascal as a teaching language. One-pass compilation, no forward declarations, built-in I/O. Turbo Pascal could compile to a .com file,

Remember, Wirth designed Pascal as a teaching language. One-pass compilation, no forward declarations, built-in I/O. Turbo Pascal could compile to a .com file, 64KB max, 16-bit pointers. I'm not sure there was a linker; the first executable instruction was the first byte in e file. The neat trick was debugging. Instead of tagging to object code with source-code line numbers, to break on line N, Turbo Pascal simply recompiled the source up to line N, and used the size of the output to match the instruction pointer in the debugged image. Move to next line? Compile one more line, and stop at the last produced instruction. But these were tiny programs, written ab initio. No readline, no X, no network, no database. Hardly any filesystem. To do something akin to readdir(3) meant writing a bespoke function to call the DOS interrupt. Putting a menu on the screen required positioning the cursor in the video buffer and putting each character in successive locations, allowing for the attribute byte. If Turbo Pascal was simple, it was also primitive. Much bigger C programs compile in the blink of an eye today. Complex programs take a long time to build today, yes. They did then, too.