14 ms·

Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)

150 points by elvis70 6y ago

outside1234 6y ago
This is the environment where my programming really took off from amateur to, well, less amateur. It was so fast to compile and so ergonomic compared to the alternatives. Great stuff.
- epx 6y ago
  Me too, with a lot of help from Herbert Schildt books.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  Me too! I graduated, in a manner of speaking, from FORTRAN, which had no recursion and pointers to Pascal. Looking back I believe Pascal was the perfect language to learn those two fundamental and tricky concepts. It felt aesthetically pleasing and struck just the right balance between the terse (and sometimes quirky) C and verbose COBOL. When I coded up those graph algorithms in Pascal I felt “happy” in a way that can’t be explained and which I didn’t experience in C.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Similar experience, I think it boils down to little details handling pointers that are out of reach in C, like reference parameters. Sure you can emulate them with double pointer indirection, which is anyway what the compiler does, but it adds more cognitive overhead.
- goddstream 6y ago
  Me too! Pascal has a natural "flow" that I lost when I transitioned to C.
- jug 6y ago
  Yes, I prefer it over C if I had to program in any of these languages. It feels higher level despite it really isn't very much, just a smidge that will often not matter technically, however it will for a developer.
mikewarot 6y ago
Pascal remains my preferred programming environment. Though a bit buggy, and short on documentation, Lazarus/Free Pascal makes quick work of any forms based windows application. I worked through the entire Advent of Code 2020 exclusively in Pascal.
- skavi 6y ago
  https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal In case others would like to skip the trip through mike's blog ;) I'm surprised at how modern a lot of the code feels.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    That goes to show what we already had back in the MS-DOS days in language capabilities.
TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago
Was a great tool and incredibly fast for its time. May have been the only thing fast on an 8086...
chihuahua 6y ago
The first software "product" that I sold was created using Turbo Pascal running on DOS. I was in high school at the time. It was designed for an Orthodontist who wanted to input (using a tablet with a cross-hair "mouse") about 20 points from an X-ray of a patient's head, then perform some calculations on the geometry to predict how the jaw bones and teeth were going to develop as the patient gets older. To this day I think it's the most interesting and satisfying thing I've ever done in terms of software. Despite getting a Ph.D. in computer science and working for Amazon, Microsoft, and Cray, nothing even comes close, with the exception of one project at Microsoft Research. These days I've given up completely any hope of working on something even remotely interesting or satisfying.
- pan69 6y ago
  Your comment comes as a kick in the gut to me. I feel the same but didn't realize it until I read your comment.
  - watermelon59 6y ago
    For me, programming has become largely unappealing since the advent of cloud computing (which happened shortly after I entered the market). I really miss the first years of my career.
    - richardcrossley 6y ago
      I also miss my early years, writing programs on a BBC Micros or for Windows 3.0 in Turbo Pascal for Windows. Now everything seems sanitized and no longer challenging. I think it's the learning experience and result we crave.
  - chihuahua 6y ago
    For many years, I'd get frustrated with jobs where the projects were invariably limited to copying and caching data. I kept moving from one job to the next, hoping to find something better. Life is better now that I'm no longer searching for that elusive unicorn.
smlckz 6y ago
Hmm, I started reading the Wikipedia article on the Pascal programming language. I was reading about the pointer types and saw a 'with' statement... Where did I see something like that before?... Yes, JavaScript! Where it is highly discouraged to use. How is it like in Pascal?
- FpUser 6y ago
  It is discouraged in Pascal as well. Can give really nasty surprises with scoping / debugging. Well to me it is mostly gossip as I refuse to use WITH in my Pascal code so no practical experience.
  - fmakunbound 6y ago
    Heh, thought it was from Lisp. No problem with scoping there.
    - kazinator 6y ago
      with macros in Lisp tend to be sanely designed: they explicitly list the symbols that are to be introduced into the scope. I don't think I've never seen a "bring the whole set of the currently defined slots of this class/struct into this scope as locals". Oh, you can do it. his is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 249. Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on an empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet. Use full-strength TXR for tough tasks, or dilute with shell scripts. 1> (defmacro with (struct obj . body) (with-gensyms (obj-sym) ^(let ((,obj-sym ,obj)) (symacrolet ,(mapcar (op list @1 ^(qref ,obj-sym ,@1)) (slots struct)) ,*body)))) with 2> (with time (time-struct-utc (time)) (list year month day)) (2021 1 30) Expansion: 3> (macroexpand '(with time (time-struct-utc (time)) (list year month day))) (let ((#:g0016 (time-struct-utc (time)))) (symacrolet ((time-local #:g0016.time-local) (time-utc #:g0016.time-utc) (time-string #:g0016.time-string) (time-parse #:g0016.time-parse) (year #:g0016.year) (month #:g0016.month) (day #:g0016.day) (hour #:g0016.hour) (min #:g0016.min) (sec #:g0016.sec) (dst #:g0016.dst) (gmtoff #:g0016.gmtoff) (zone #:g0016.zone)) (list year month day))) Total expansion; symacrolet gone, a.b desugared into (slot a 'b): 4> (expand '(with time (time-struct-utc (time)) (list year month day))) (let ((#:g0017 (time-struct-utc (time)))) (list (slot #:g0017 'year) (slot #:g0017 'month) (slot #:g0017 'day)))
froh 6y ago
I really wonder how Pascal and the Pascal family of languages, including modula/oberon and ada, how they became niche and how java and c++ took over the world?
- cable2600 6y ago
  Free and Open Source languages cost less than commercial languages. I remember that Janus Ada for DOS cost thousands for a license. Java and GNU C++ were free. Now Microsoft has the Community edition of Visual Studio for free C#, Visual BASIC.Net, C++ and other languages.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. Long answer, UNIX spread like fire, because Bell Labs/AT&T initially weren't allowed to sell it. So the code was given to university, and while they needed to pay for a UNIX license to use it, the price was symbolic versus paying for something like VMS. Which naturally made UNIX the number one choice for the startups trying to get into the Workstation market during the 90's. So C started to spread into the 8 and 16 bit computers in some form. When those 8 and 16 bit home computers, written in Assembly, started to be replaced by more powerful systems, the OS vendors were adopting C as the language. Most won't be aware of this today, but Microsoft did sell Xenix and MS-DOS at the same time, they sold Xenix as they decided to focus on MS-DOS instead. In fact, MS-DOS 4 failure was an attempt to make it more UNIX like. At the same time, maybe to reduce costs, the OS vendors started to reduce the amount of compilers they were selling it for their platforms, selling only the same ones as they were using themselves for the OS, which by then naturally meant C. Any other language started to be available only from third parties, and most of the time without bindings to all OS APIs. So given the choice of buying the language programming tools from the OS vendor, with everything ready to code, or paying even more (you would need the OS SDK anyway) and having to code bindings, the majority stayed with OS SDK only. As C++ is a C sibling, coming from UNIX birthplace, it quickly found a place among C compiler vendors tooling. Java, well it was pushing by Sun, quickly adopted by Microsoft, IBM and Oracle on their platforms. So enjoyed a bit that extra love from platform owners. Having lived through this evolution, I have learned only to bet on platform languages, or those that eventually get blessed by platform owners on their official SDKs.
cable2600 6y ago
It worked on a Commodore 128 and 1571 drive in CP/M80 mode. I used to program in it way back when. Cheaper than C64 Pascal.
anta40 6y ago
Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming. MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C for programming competitions. Already had some experiences with Basic, and found C to be too "low level" for my taste, I picked Pascal. Next year, I jumped into Delphi: learning Win32 GUI basics and some database programming with MySQL. Probably pretty advanced for a high school kids, since most of my friends were interested in music or games :) I never used Pascal/Delphi for work though, because Java has been a major player in mobile development scene (J2ME -> BlackBerry -> Android....). One of the things I appreciate about Pascal compilers is: blazing fast compile time. And I think it still applies to FPC (Free Pascal Compiler). You can rebuild the whole compiler + basic libraries from scratch under 5 minutes. Can't say the same thing about GCC. Well the last time I did this was in 2014 (or 2015?), though. Now, if I want a native compiler with fast compilation speed, I'd pick Go or Nim.....
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Java, .NET [0] and D do it for me. But I do share a similar Pascal story, just a decade earlier. :) [0] - People keep forgetting there are AOT toolchains (and JIT caches) for them.
- fmxexpress 6y ago
  The latest version of Delphi compiles 1 billion lines of code in 5 minutes on a 16 core 5950X and 2 minutes on a 64 core 3990X.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Thanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.) We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C previously). But I still prefer Pascal's overall 'ideology' and syntax over C (except for the BEGIN ... END - would prefer braces :).
  - 6y ago
anonymousiam 6y ago
I learned Pascal with Turbo Pascal on CP/M sometime around 1983 or 1984. IMHO it was the best software development environment for that platform. It was full featured, very fast (both compilation and run-time), and very memory efficient. I also had Microsoft CBASIC, Fortran-80, COBOL-80, BDS-C, and many assemblers. Turbo Pascal put them all to shame. The C compilers for CP/M could not even do floating point math. Turbo Pascal had no such limitations.
pjmlp 6y ago
I was so lucky that for a matter of fate I ended up buying a Turbo Pascal 4.0 book, when figuring out where to move after Turbo Basic. Eventually I got old of Turbo Pascal 3.0, started learning there (yep a version below), then at school Turbo Pascal 5.5 was actually the programming language after Basic, so I got introduced to units, and Object Pascal. Eventually due to an agreement with the teacher that if had a theme I wanted to learn more, I could study it and present to the class. I choose OOP, which in the process made the owner of a Turbo Pascal 6.0 copy, with the wonderful Turbo Vision framework to learn from. On the same year I bought a copy of Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 (target Windows 3.x), with the Object Windows Library, a pleasure to work with versus bare bones Win32. So when I go to learn C a couple of years later, it never impressed me, too little features, too unsafe, the only thing going for it was being available in more platforms than Turbo Pascal was. Luckily the same class also had a Turbo C++ 1.0 package that was being ignored, and that brought me the Turbo Pascal features I was enjoying, alongside the portability that Turbo Pascal lacked. From my point of view, only Microsoft and Apple tools seem to keep on the same developer tooling spirit and language capabilities.
LawrenceWoodman 6y ago
Turbo Pascal is great and I love the fact that it uses the Wordstar key combinations. I wish that there was a version for 8080 but I understand why they went with the Z80. Borland went on to create Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M which was very similar to TP but with lots of language enhancements and faster execution time of the resulting binaries. However, it was released quite late in 1986 and quickly withdrawn.
- billforsternz 6y ago
  It's been a long long long time since I heard anyone opining one way or the other on the classic 1970s dilemma of whether to stay compatible to the 8080 or use all those cool new Z80 instructions considering that the Z80 was kicking Intel's butt in the 8 bit CPU market!
  - LawrenceWoodman 6y ago
    It's mainly that I just prefer programming in assembler on the 8080/8085 - it's easier to fit the instruction set neatly in my head. The 8085 is also much easier to emulate and I like the ease of interfacing it with hardware. This preference tends to colour everything I do on CP/M.
    - billforsternz 6y ago
      I understand. So many years ago I built a fast CP/M emulator using a novel scheme. How did it go now, I remember; lodsb mov ah,al jmp ax. So just three instructions none of which affected the flags. So no need for lahf/sahf. The downside was that I needed 64K to sparsely store my opcode emulations. Opcode 0x00 at 0x0000. 0x01 at 0x0101. 0x02 at 0x0202 etc. In each case the code would just be the direct emulation of the 8080 opcode followed by lodsb mov ah,al jmp ax. Opcode 0xff was a manageable problem. But yes, I just did the 8080 instructions, and I remember now that most CP/M software was fine with that, the Turbo Pascal software was an exception.
- odersky 6y ago
  I was the co-author of Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M. It was quite a capable system to fit in less than 64K. Great memories. At the time Borland intended to develop their own version of Modula-2 for IBM PC, so they bought ours as a complement for the CP/M versions they were still covering. But the in-house version got delayed a lot. It was eventually released as Topspeed Modula-2 several years later, from a spinoff. If Borland had let us also do the IBM-PC version in around 1984, maybe history would have changed and Modula-2 would have become more popular.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Currently writing a CP/M game in Z80... I forgot in 40y how hard assembler is to write and how nice a revolution something like TP is.
timonoko 6y ago
At sometime around 1976 Pascal was The Language of the Future. There was some project to program an OS with Pascal in Helsinki, possibly the Russian MIR-computer. Anyways I heard a heated discussion where they wanted money for "tens of man-years". Very annoying, so I wrote Pascal-compiler for 8080 just like that in few months. It was little restricted but quite usable. Then Very Strange Thing happened: the Finnish Army wanted it, maybe because it was not hampered by American Comecon-embargo and better than nothing (or assembler). I was ordered to write a short manual and forget all about it. Not a big deal, it was just a demo, and I was already interested in some other things.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  That's an interesting anecdote - so did the Finnish army actually use your Pascal compiler? And when you say you were ordered to write a manual for it, where you in the Finnish army at that time?
  - timonoko 6y ago
    I was in the University Telecom Lab, but employed by the army in a project to specify a portable texting device, which eventually become the well-known Finnish Army "Kyber"-radiotermimal. I specified the operating system of this non-existing device in my own nokoPascal. This was the time I was playing with my symbolic stack machine, a Forth of sort, but wierd metacharacters which allowed direct execution of "(+ 1 2)" which eventually become Nokolisp. Not a big thing at all -- I just made a Pascal-compiler to this metamachine. http://timonoko.github.io/Nokolisp.htm http://timonoko.github.io/Nokolisp.htm
    - timonoko 6y ago
      Oh yes now I remembered it all. I went to army right after that. But I was a Hippie at the time and concious objector of sort. The inquisition panel found out my objection was not "real" so I ended up as Army Radio Man. But I learned to morse very badly, probably because of mild dyslexia. So rest of the year I was making test equipment for a Russian Missile Control because of language skills ( https://flic.kr/p/JycyMy https://flic.kr/p/JycyMy ). And just occasionally consulting the "Kyber"-team. I did not get any medals or ranks for my contribution, because untrustworthy Hippie with bad hairdo. Also I was rejected from army reserve duties, which was very good.
i_dursun 6y ago
Good old memories. I have earned my first money from Turbo Pascal. I was blown away when Turbo Pascal 7 came with syntax highlighting. I also spent days trying to fix infamous Runtime Error 200.
inglor_cz 6y ago
My first computer was an old PC XT, ancient even by the undemanding standards of 1995, but cost under 100 USD - which counted a lot in early post-Communist Central Europe with average wage in the 250 USD territory. I did a lot of Turbo Pascaling on that one, but it was frustrating watching the compiler go so slooowly while I already noticed a misprint or a missing ; on the screen. The last thing I did on Turbo Pascal was a program that drew fractals in 320x200 using direct memory access (byte absolute). I tried to get it working in 640x480, but the differences between individual VGA cards were too big. That was 386 already, though.
- mbeex 6y ago
  > but the differences between individual VGA cards were too big. Buyed the programming manual for the ET4000 GPU (>100DM for this manual alone, a lot for a student from the eastern part of Germany at this time), opcodes and all. I liked the possibility to easily mix Assembler with Pascal in Turbo Pascal. Machine code for graphics, FPU, interrupt programming, the higher language for anything else. After that, I learned C from the Open Source Fractint. So, the transition wasn't that painful after TP's decline. And anything was so snappy in Turbo Pascals text mode windowing system (as with Norton Commander too).
- fb03 6y ago
  It was so easy to draw simple graphics in pascal, right? I have this snippet burned in my head and I used it all the time in MS-DOS' on Turbo Pascal 6 or 7 to get to the tasty 320x200 palleted graphics mode: asm mov ax,13h int 10h end iirc, after that you could simply directly access video memory using something like "mem[$A000:x+200*y] = color;" and that was it. Fun times.
KronisLV 6y ago
It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal ( https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/ ) and the Lazarus IDE ( https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) both of which seem like stable, open and capable projects. That said, i'm afraid that modern Pascal isn't awfully popular, which hurts its practicality a bit (e.g. learning about it, finding tutorials and others' experience with it, getting help). However, it's approach to native GUI development is pretty good, the language itself seems pretty okay and the compilation times are generally pretty good, as is performance ( https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/which-programs-are-fastest.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... ). Perhaps the only actual dealbreaker i can think of, is the fact that it doesn't have that many stable or even first party web development frameworks/libraries ( the closest i've found to that being https://wiki.freepascal.org/fpWeb_Tutorial https://wiki.freepascal.org/fpWeb_Tutorial and https://wiki.freepascal.org/fcl-web https://wiki.freepascal.org/fcl-web ), however they don't seem to be as popular as the "de facto" frameworks of the other languages. For example, Java has Spring (and Spring Boot), Node has Express, Python has Django (or even Flask), Ruby has Rails, .NET Core has ASP.NET Core, which are all widely supported and well documented, with plenty of tutorials. Of course, that has only been my limited experience, since i mostly work with the other alternatives at my workplace and only dabble in Pascal occasionally in my free time. Would anyone care to comment on their experience with modern Pascal as well?
- edwinyzh 6y ago
  The most powerful and stable web framework is mORMot, it supports both FPC and Delphi. Here is its version 2 in development: https://github.com/synopse/mORMot2 https://github.com/synopse/mORMot2 I use Delphi all the time, IMHO, it's the best tool for Windows desktop app development - concise language, blazing fast compile time, easy UI design, flexible UI framework, all-in-one IDE, and so on. It's such a joy to me :) And here is my new desktop software written in Delphi: https://docxmanager.com/ https://docxmanager.com/
- augustk 6y ago
  > It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal The latest language from Niklaus Wirth is Oberon which was last updated in 2016. It is both smaller and more capable than Pascal. https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html
clarifier123 6y ago
See also an article about Modula-2 for CP/M from the same author: https://techtinkering.com/2013/03/12/if-only-borland-had-stuck-with-turbo-modula-2-for-cpm/ https://techtinkering.com/2013/03/12/if-only-borland-had-stu... Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704733
TonnnnUK 6y ago
My first exposure to programming came in college in 1998, we used Turbo Pascal to learn programming concepts. It absolutely went over my head at the time, I just couldn't grasp it for the most part! And there began my life long journey to understand this thing called programming! Over 20 years later and I am still bamboozled and confused frequently, but it's my living these days!
kcartlidge 6y ago
Nostalgia! I learned programming in my own time on 1980's 8-bit machines, but in college it was Pascal on Vax VMS then Turbo Pascal on, IIRC, an Act Sirius. Loved the language. Then along came JPI TopSpeed Modula-2 (Pascal++ [joke]) and even though I now do C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and FreePascal, nothing matches the sheer productivity and performance that TopSpeed provided. And their IDE was incredible at the time (though Turbo Pascal 3 having a compiler and editor in around 40KB was technically more awesome).
- jksmith 6y ago
  Yeah I have to say if TSM2 had been maintained I'd still be using it. It was badass. Remember that green thread car traffic demo? That was cute. It's unfortunate the tyranny of C never let M2 break through. Opinion is that the software world would would be in better shape now if M2 had gotten a real foothold.
  - kcartlidge 6y ago
    > Remember that green thread car traffic demo? Indeed - I still have the software (though the disks are long gone). A few years back I even rewrote that demo in C# (console app) because why not. Edit: Anders Heljsberg is responsible for C# and TypeScript. Prior to that he wrote what became Turbo Pascal and was chief architect on Delphi. Seems I can't escape his stuff.
codesnik 6y ago
Pascal is under-appreciated. TurboPascal was my first programming language/platform on PC (used 286 in 1994) and the only problem I had was lack of documentation on actual video and sound hardware, not with the language itself. I was surprised to learn that many DOS-era games I loved were written in pascal actually, some of them were pretty performant (Tyrian, for example). Almost on the topic: in Russia there were popular school computers UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC, pdp-11 clones with deep changes, with an RT-11 compatible OS. They were everywhere, well into late 199x, when they were deeply obsolete, because schools didn't have funding to upgrade classrooms. It was my first computing platform when I was a kid, but the only language accessible was BASIC, with a line editor (pretty strange concept nowadays), line numbers, no named subroutines, etc. In 1997 I was suprised to find in a new school I've transfered to the same old computer but with Pascal compiler on it. With an actual editor, a very fast compilation time, and all still crammed into 64kb of memory. I was really impressed.
- mobilio 6y ago
  Here in Bulgaria we had Pravetz computers and Pascal was learned in past on schools.
jksmith 6y ago
Oh, the tricks I pulled off with TP back in the late 80's-early 90's. Paged memory managers, HP inkjet and pcl libraries, text window managers, parsers, compressors, sorts and searches, my youngest son as a toddler thinking the 3.5 floppy on my work machine was a slot to put quarters...Fun stuff, good times.
jdhzzz 6y ago
Title should have been: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice
DennisP 6y ago
When I was in high school, I wrote lots of stuff in BASICA and spent long hours with printouts spread over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to figure out what was going wrong. I'd seen articles about "structured programming" and felt it would stifle my creativity. One dad Dad brought home Turbo Pascal. To try it out I implemented Conway's Game of Life. Once I got past my syntax errors, I was shocked when it worked correctly the very first time. I never wrote another line of BASICA.
qwerty456127 6y ago
I didn't know Turbo Pascal was available on CP/M. In case it was I bet it's the best language available there.
analog31 6y ago
I first learned BASIC in high school, learned Pascal shortly after that. I think a great thing about Pascal was its origin as a teaching language. As a result, the textbooks placed a heavy emphasis on learning good programming techniques, and the language supported those techniques. I think maybe it's no mere coincidence that good teaching tools also become good general tools for those of us who are not destined to become full time pro's. Learning BASIC and Pascal side by side was a great lesson in how to write good code, because you could make your Pascal programs so much more readable and organized. Even today, if any human has a faint hope of reading and using my code (in Python or C), it's thanks to the skills I learned from Pascal. When I got my first computer, a non-PC-compatible MS-DOS machine, I remember my dad asking me some vague questions about it. He had heard us talk about Pascal (my mom and brother both learned it), and the Wall Street Journal had a glowing article about it. He had no idea what it was, but got me it for my birthday. And it followed the "rules" of MS-DOS, so it ran on my weird computer! No graphics, but who cares, I was up and running with Pascal. I found a magazine article on how to attach a serial port to my computer, wrote a terminal emulator in Pascal, and found an old 300 baud modem. I was able to complete my computer assignments from my dorm room. In FORTRAN.
icedchai 6y ago
I remember using Turbo Pascal in high school, in my AP Computer Science class. This was in the early 90's, running on a PS/2 model 30 (8mhz 8086.) It was lighting fast, even on those low end machines that were several years old at the time! Fun times.
ubermonkey 6y ago
My assumption is that a HUGE chunk of developers around my age (50) started out with line-numbered GWBASIC or similar, and then had Turbo Pascal as their first "real" language. I have had a million technical books in my life, and I held on to many of them for a long time past their technical viability just out of sentimentality. Now I limit myself to half a shelf. On that shelf are my well-worn K&R, a similarly dogeared very early O'Reilly Perl book, the Peter Norton Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC, and a Waite Group book on Turbo Pascal 5.5.
casid 6y ago
Turbo Pascal was my first programming language, I remember hacking together small games with it and sharing them at school on floppy disks. It's a shame what Embarcadero has done to Turbo Pascal's successor Delphi. It's really an amazing language if it weren't for the god awful IDE. If you're happen to still work on Delphi enterprise software I'd highly recommend to have a look at OmniPascal (https://www.omnipascal.com/ https://www.omnipascal.com/), a very smart VisualStudio code plugin. It's a gem that provides JetBrains-like quality completions/refactorings for Delphi/Pascal.
mikewarot 6y ago
My first real project in Turbo Pascal was a system to record the inspection of Fire Protection Equipment in Coal Fired Generating Stations (where small fires break out all the time due to the coal dust everywhere). I wrote a set of routines to allow field based text editing, and built up a CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) database of locations, routes, equipment. I took 4 weeks instead of the two I estimated. The customer loved it, it met all the requirements... and was totally impractical as a system. I spent the next year rewriting it in a fairly agile manner working for the Russ, Assistant Plant Manager. He taught me how to make user friendly software in a simple manner... we would pull a person from the plant and say something like "This is Mike... he wrote this program. [Worker Name], I don't expect you to be a computer expert, it's not your job... I want you to do X,Y and Z... If something goes wrong, it's Mike's fault" "Press F1 for Help" was ALWAYS at the top of the screen after the first 5 seconds of the first user trying things and not knowing what to do. I learned an amazing amount about writing software from Russ. One time... he asked "what would happen if I disconnected it right now?" I didn't know, and said so.... I got that taken care of in the next week. You could disconnect at any time, and never lose a record. It was a fun job.
davidhbolton 6y ago
I bought this (back in 1986 I think) and used it on a Tatung Einstein running CP/M. I absolutely loved it and went on with TP 4.0, 5.0, 5.5 and 7 then switched to Delphi.

150 points by elvis70 6y ago

This is the environment where my programming really took off from amateur to, well, less amateur. It was so fast to compile and so ergonomic compared to the alternatives. Great stuff.

epx 6y ago
Me too, with a lot of help from Herbert Schildt books.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
vishnugupta 6y ago
Me too! I graduated, in a manner of speaking, from FORTRAN, which had no recursion and pointers to Pascal. Looking back I believe Pascal was the perfect language to learn those two fundamental and tricky concepts. It felt aesthetically pleasing and struck just the right balance between the terse (and sometimes quirky) C and verbose COBOL. When I coded up those graph algorithms in Pascal I felt “happy” in a way that can’t be explained and which I didn’t experience in C.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Similar experience, I think it boils down to little details handling pointers that are out of reach in C, like reference parameters. Sure you can emulate them with double pointer indirection, which is anyway what the compiler does, but it adds more cognitive overhead.
goddstream 6y ago
Me too! Pascal has a natural "flow" that I lost when I transitioned to C.
jug 6y ago
Yes, I prefer it over C if I had to program in any of these languages. It feels higher level despite it really isn't very much, just a smidge that will often not matter technically, however it will for a developer.

mikewarot 6y ago

Pascal remains my preferred programming environment. Though a bit buggy, and short on documentation, Lazarus/Free Pascal makes quick work of any forms based windows application. I worked through the entire Advent of Code 2020 exclusively in Pascal.

skavi 6y ago
https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal https://github.com/mikewarot/Advent_of_Code_in_Pascal In case others would like to skip the trip through mike's blog ;) I'm surprised at how modern a lot of the code feels.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  That goes to show what we already had back in the MS-DOS days in language capabilities.

TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago

Was a great tool and incredibly fast for its time. May have been the only thing fast on an 8086...

chihuahua 6y ago

The first software "product" that I sold was created using Turbo Pascal running on DOS. I was in high school at the time. It was designed for an Orthodontist who wanted to input (using a tablet with a cross-hair "mouse") about 20 points from an X-ray of a patient's head, then perform some calculations on the geometry to predict how the jaw bones and teeth were going to develop as the patient gets older. To this day I think it's the most interesting and satisfying thing I've ever done in terms of software. Despite getting a Ph.D. in computer science and working for Amazon, Microsoft, and Cray, nothing even comes close, with the exception of one project at Microsoft Research. These days I've given up completely any hope of working on something even remotely interesting or satisfying.

pan69 6y ago
Your comment comes as a kick in the gut to me. I feel the same but didn't realize it until I read your comment.
- watermelon59 6y ago
  For me, programming has become largely unappealing since the advent of cloud computing (which happened shortly after I entered the market). I really miss the first years of my career.
  - richardcrossley 6y ago
    I also miss my early years, writing programs on a BBC Micros or for Windows 3.0 in Turbo Pascal for Windows. Now everything seems sanitized and no longer challenging. I think it's the learning experience and result we crave.
- chihuahua 6y ago
  For many years, I'd get frustrated with jobs where the projects were invariably limited to copying and caching data. I kept moving from one job to the next, hoping to find something better. Life is better now that I'm no longer searching for that elusive unicorn.

smlckz 6y ago

Hmm, I started reading the Wikipedia article on the Pascal programming language. I was reading about the pointer types and saw a 'with' statement... Where did I see something like that before?... Yes, JavaScript! Where it is highly discouraged to use. How is it like in Pascal?

FpUser 6y ago
It is discouraged in Pascal as well. Can give really nasty surprises with scoping / debugging. Well to me it is mostly gossip as I refuse to use WITH in my Pascal code so no practical experience.
- fmakunbound 6y ago
  Heh, thought it was from Lisp. No problem with scoping there.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    with macros in Lisp tend to be sanely designed: they explicitly list the symbols that are to be introduced into the scope. I don't think I've never seen a "bring the whole set of the currently defined slots of this class/struct into this scope as locals". Oh, you can do it. his is the TXR Lisp interactive listener of TXR 249. Quit with :quit or Ctrl-D on an empty line. Ctrl-X ? for cheatsheet. Use full-strength TXR for tough tasks, or dilute with shell scripts. 1> (defmacro with (struct obj . body) (with-gensyms (obj-sym) ^(let ((,obj-sym ,obj)) (symacrolet ,(mapcar (op list @1 ^(qref ,obj-sym ,@1)) (slots struct)) ,*body)))) with 2> (with time (time-struct-utc (time)) (list year month day)) (2021 1 30) Expansion: 3> (macroexpand '(with time (time-struct-utc (time)) (list year month day))) (let ((#:g0016 (time-struct-utc (time)))) (symacrolet ((time-local #:g0016.time-local) (time-utc #:g0016.time-utc) (time-string #:g0016.time-string) (time-parse #:g0016.time-parse) (year #:g0016.year) (month #:g0016.month) (day #:g0016.day) (hour #:g0016.hour) (min #:g0016.min) (sec #:g0016.sec) (dst #:g0016.dst) (gmtoff #:g0016.gmtoff) (zone #:g0016.zone)) (list year month day))) Total expansion; symacrolet gone, a.b desugared into (slot a 'b): 4> (expand '(with time (time-struct-utc (time)) (list year month day))) (let ((#:g0017 (time-struct-utc (time)))) (list (slot #:g0017 'year) (slot #:g0017 'month) (slot #:g0017 'day)))

froh 6y ago

I really wonder how Pascal and the Pascal family of languages, including modula/oberon and ada, how they became niche and how java and c++ took over the world?

cable2600 6y ago
Free and Open Source languages cost less than commercial languages. I remember that Janus Ada for DOS cost thousands for a license. Java and GNU C++ were free. Now Microsoft has the Community edition of Visual Studio for free C#, Visual BASIC.Net, C++ and other languages.
pjmlp 6y ago
Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption. Long answer, UNIX spread like fire, because Bell Labs/AT&T initially weren't allowed to sell it. So the code was given to university, and while they needed to pay for a UNIX license to use it, the price was symbolic versus paying for something like VMS. Which naturally made UNIX the number one choice for the startups trying to get into the Workstation market during the 90's. So C started to spread into the 8 and 16 bit computers in some form. When those 8 and 16 bit home computers, written in Assembly, started to be replaced by more powerful systems, the OS vendors were adopting C as the language. Most won't be aware of this today, but Microsoft did sell Xenix and MS-DOS at the same time, they sold Xenix as they decided to focus on MS-DOS instead. In fact, MS-DOS 4 failure was an attempt to make it more UNIX like. At the same time, maybe to reduce costs, the OS vendors started to reduce the amount of compilers they were selling it for their platforms, selling only the same ones as they were using themselves for the OS, which by then naturally meant C. Any other language started to be available only from third parties, and most of the time without bindings to all OS APIs. So given the choice of buying the language programming tools from the OS vendor, with everything ready to code, or paying even more (you would need the OS SDK anyway) and having to code bindings, the majority stayed with OS SDK only. As C++ is a C sibling, coming from UNIX birthplace, it quickly found a place among C compiler vendors tooling. Java, well it was pushing by Sun, quickly adopted by Microsoft, IBM and Oracle on their platforms. So enjoyed a bit that extra love from platform owners. Having lived through this evolution, I have learned only to bet on platform languages, or those that eventually get blessed by platform owners on their official SDKs.

cable2600 6y ago

It worked on a Commodore 128 and 1571 drive in CP/M80 mode. I used to program in it way back when. Cheaper than C64 Pascal.

anta40 6y ago

Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming. MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C for programming competitions. Already had some experiences with Basic, and found C to be too "low level" for my taste, I picked Pascal. Next year, I jumped into Delphi: learning Win32 GUI basics and some database programming with MySQL. Probably pretty advanced for a high school kids, since most of my friends were interested in music or games :) I never used Pascal/Delphi for work though, because Java has been a major player in mobile development scene (J2ME -> BlackBerry -> Android....). One of the things I appreciate about Pascal compilers is: blazing fast compile time. And I think it still applies to FPC (Free Pascal Compiler). You can rebuild the whole compiler + basic libraries from scratch under 5 minutes. Can't say the same thing about GCC. Well the last time I did this was in 2014 (or 2015?), though. Now, if I want a native compiler with fast compilation speed, I'd pick Go or Nim.....

pjmlp 6y ago
Java, .NET [0] and D do it for me. But I do share a similar Pascal story, just a decade earlier. :) [0] - People keep forgetting there are AOT toolchains (and JIT caches) for them.
fmxexpress 6y ago
The latest version of Delphi compiles 1 billion lines of code in 5 minutes on a 16 core 5950X and 2 minutes on a 64 core 3990X.
webmobdev 6y ago
Thanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.) We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C previously). But I still prefer Pascal's overall 'ideology' and syntax over C (except for the BEGIN ... END - would prefer braces :).
- 6y ago

anonymousiam 6y ago

I learned Pascal with Turbo Pascal on CP/M sometime around 1983 or 1984. IMHO it was the best software development environment for that platform. It was full featured, very fast (both compilation and run-time), and very memory efficient. I also had Microsoft CBASIC, Fortran-80, COBOL-80, BDS-C, and many assemblers. Turbo Pascal put them all to shame. The C compilers for CP/M could not even do floating point math. Turbo Pascal had no such limitations.

pjmlp 6y ago

I was so lucky that for a matter of fate I ended up buying a Turbo Pascal 4.0 book, when figuring out where to move after Turbo Basic. Eventually I got old of Turbo Pascal 3.0, started learning there (yep a version below), then at school Turbo Pascal 5.5 was actually the programming language after Basic, so I got introduced to units, and Object Pascal. Eventually due to an agreement with the teacher that if had a theme I wanted to learn more, I could study it and present to the class. I choose OOP, which in the process made the owner of a Turbo Pascal 6.0 copy, with the wonderful Turbo Vision framework to learn from. On the same year I bought a copy of Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 (target Windows 3.x), with the Object Windows Library, a pleasure to work with versus bare bones Win32. So when I go to learn C a couple of years later, it never impressed me, too little features, too unsafe, the only thing going for it was being available in more platforms than Turbo Pascal was. Luckily the same class also had a Turbo C++ 1.0 package that was being ignored, and that brought me the Turbo Pascal features I was enjoying, alongside the portability that Turbo Pascal lacked. From my point of view, only Microsoft and Apple tools seem to keep on the same developer tooling spirit and language capabilities.

LawrenceWoodman 6y ago

Turbo Pascal is great and I love the fact that it uses the Wordstar key combinations. I wish that there was a version for 8080 but I understand why they went with the Z80. Borland went on to create Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M which was very similar to TP but with lots of language enhancements and faster execution time of the resulting binaries. However, it was released quite late in 1986 and quickly withdrawn.

billforsternz 6y ago
It's been a long long long time since I heard anyone opining one way or the other on the classic 1970s dilemma of whether to stay compatible to the 8080 or use all those cool new Z80 instructions considering that the Z80 was kicking Intel's butt in the 8 bit CPU market!
- LawrenceWoodman 6y ago
  It's mainly that I just prefer programming in assembler on the 8080/8085 - it's easier to fit the instruction set neatly in my head. The 8085 is also much easier to emulate and I like the ease of interfacing it with hardware. This preference tends to colour everything I do on CP/M.
  - billforsternz 6y ago
    I understand. So many years ago I built a fast CP/M emulator using a novel scheme. How did it go now, I remember; lodsb mov ah,al jmp ax. So just three instructions none of which affected the flags. So no need for lahf/sahf. The downside was that I needed 64K to sparsely store my opcode emulations. Opcode 0x00 at 0x0000. 0x01 at 0x0101. 0x02 at 0x0202 etc. In each case the code would just be the direct emulation of the 8080 opcode followed by lodsb mov ah,al jmp ax. Opcode 0xff was a manageable problem. But yes, I just did the 8080 instructions, and I remember now that most CP/M software was fine with that, the Turbo Pascal software was an exception.
odersky 6y ago
I was the co-author of Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M. It was quite a capable system to fit in less than 64K. Great memories. At the time Borland intended to develop their own version of Modula-2 for IBM PC, so they bought ours as a complement for the CP/M versions they were still covering. But the in-house version got delayed a lot. It was eventually released as Topspeed Modula-2 several years later, from a spinoff. If Borland had let us also do the IBM-PC version in around 1984, maybe history would have changed and Modula-2 would have become more popular.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Currently writing a CP/M game in Z80... I forgot in 40y how hard assembler is to write and how nice a revolution something like TP is.

timonoko 6y ago

At sometime around 1976 Pascal was The Language of the Future. There was some project to program an OS with Pascal in Helsinki, possibly the Russian MIR-computer. Anyways I heard a heated discussion where they wanted money for "tens of man-years". Very annoying, so I wrote Pascal-compiler for 8080 just like that in few months. It was little restricted but quite usable. Then Very Strange Thing happened: the Finnish Army wanted it, maybe because it was not hampered by American Comecon-embargo and better than nothing (or assembler). I was ordered to write a short manual and forget all about it. Not a big deal, it was just a demo, and I was already interested in some other things.

webmobdev 6y ago
That's an interesting anecdote - so did the Finnish army actually use your Pascal compiler? And when you say you were ordered to write a manual for it, where you in the Finnish army at that time?
- timonoko 6y ago
  I was in the University Telecom Lab, but employed by the army in a project to specify a portable texting device, which eventually become the well-known Finnish Army "Kyber"-radiotermimal. I specified the operating system of this non-existing device in my own nokoPascal. This was the time I was playing with my symbolic stack machine, a Forth of sort, but wierd metacharacters which allowed direct execution of "(+ 1 2)" which eventually become Nokolisp. Not a big thing at all -- I just made a Pascal-compiler to this metamachine. http://timonoko.github.io/Nokolisp.htm http://timonoko.github.io/Nokolisp.htm
  - timonoko 6y ago
    Oh yes now I remembered it all. I went to army right after that. But I was a Hippie at the time and concious objector of sort. The inquisition panel found out my objection was not "real" so I ended up as Army Radio Man. But I learned to morse very badly, probably because of mild dyslexia. So rest of the year I was making test equipment for a Russian Missile Control because of language skills ( https://flic.kr/p/JycyMy https://flic.kr/p/JycyMy ). And just occasionally consulting the "Kyber"-team. I did not get any medals or ranks for my contribution, because untrustworthy Hippie with bad hairdo. Also I was rejected from army reserve duties, which was very good.

i_dursun 6y ago

Good old memories. I have earned my first money from Turbo Pascal. I was blown away when Turbo Pascal 7 came with syntax highlighting. I also spent days trying to fix infamous Runtime Error 200.

inglor_cz 6y ago

My first computer was an old PC XT, ancient even by the undemanding standards of 1995, but cost under 100 USD - which counted a lot in early post-Communist Central Europe with average wage in the 250 USD territory. I did a lot of Turbo Pascaling on that one, but it was frustrating watching the compiler go so slooowly while I already noticed a misprint or a missing ; on the screen. The last thing I did on Turbo Pascal was a program that drew fractals in 320x200 using direct memory access (byte absolute). I tried to get it working in 640x480, but the differences between individual VGA cards were too big. That was 386 already, though.

mbeex 6y ago
> but the differences between individual VGA cards were too big. Buyed the programming manual for the ET4000 GPU (>100DM for this manual alone, a lot for a student from the eastern part of Germany at this time), opcodes and all. I liked the possibility to easily mix Assembler with Pascal in Turbo Pascal. Machine code for graphics, FPU, interrupt programming, the higher language for anything else. After that, I learned C from the Open Source Fractint. So, the transition wasn't that painful after TP's decline. And anything was so snappy in Turbo Pascals text mode windowing system (as with Norton Commander too).
fb03 6y ago
It was so easy to draw simple graphics in pascal, right? I have this snippet burned in my head and I used it all the time in MS-DOS' on Turbo Pascal 6 or 7 to get to the tasty 320x200 palleted graphics mode: asm mov ax,13h int 10h end iirc, after that you could simply directly access video memory using something like "mem[$A000:x+200*y] = color;" and that was it. Fun times.

KronisLV 6y ago

It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal ( https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/ ) and the Lazarus IDE ( https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) both of which seem like stable, open and capable projects. That said, i'm afraid that modern Pascal isn't awfully popular, which hurts its practicality a bit (e.g. learning about it, finding tutorials and others' experience with it, getting help). However, it's approach to native GUI development is pretty good, the language itself seems pretty okay and the compilation times are generally pretty good, as is performance ( https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/which-programs-are-fastest.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... ). Perhaps the only actual dealbreaker i can think of, is the fact that it doesn't have that many stable or even first party web development frameworks/libraries ( the closest i've found to that being https://wiki.freepascal.org/fpWeb_Tutorial https://wiki.freepascal.org/fpWeb_Tutorial and https://wiki.freepascal.org/fcl-web https://wiki.freepascal.org/fcl-web ), however they don't seem to be as popular as the "de facto" frameworks of the other languages. For example, Java has Spring (and Spring Boot), Node has Express, Python has Django (or even Flask), Ruby has Rails, .NET Core has ASP.NET Core, which are all widely supported and well documented, with plenty of tutorials. Of course, that has only been my limited experience, since i mostly work with the other alternatives at my workplace and only dabble in Pascal occasionally in my free time. Would anyone care to comment on their experience with modern Pascal as well?

edwinyzh 6y ago
The most powerful and stable web framework is mORMot, it supports both FPC and Delphi. Here is its version 2 in development: https://github.com/synopse/mORMot2 https://github.com/synopse/mORMot2 I use Delphi all the time, IMHO, it's the best tool for Windows desktop app development - concise language, blazing fast compile time, easy UI design, flexible UI framework, all-in-one IDE, and so on. It's such a joy to me :) And here is my new desktop software written in Delphi: https://docxmanager.com/ https://docxmanager.com/
augustk 6y ago
> It seems like the "modern" way to write Pascal would be with FreePascal The latest language from Niklaus Wirth is Oberon which was last updated in 2016. It is both smaller and more capable than Pascal. https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html https://www.miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

clarifier123 6y ago

See also an article about Modula-2 for CP/M from the same author: https://techtinkering.com/2013/03/12/if-only-borland-had-stuck-with-turbo-modula-2-for-cpm/ https://techtinkering.com/2013/03/12/if-only-borland-had-stu... Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704733

TonnnnUK 6y ago

My first exposure to programming came in college in 1998, we used Turbo Pascal to learn programming concepts. It absolutely went over my head at the time, I just couldn't grasp it for the most part! And there began my life long journey to understand this thing called programming! Over 20 years later and I am still bamboozled and confused frequently, but it's my living these days!

kcartlidge 6y ago

Nostalgia! I learned programming in my own time on 1980's 8-bit machines, but in college it was Pascal on Vax VMS then Turbo Pascal on, IIRC, an Act Sirius. Loved the language. Then along came JPI TopSpeed Modula-2 (Pascal++ [joke]) and even though I now do C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and FreePascal, nothing matches the sheer productivity and performance that TopSpeed provided. And their IDE was incredible at the time (though Turbo Pascal 3 having a compiler and editor in around 40KB was technically more awesome).

jksmith 6y ago
Yeah I have to say if TSM2 had been maintained I'd still be using it. It was badass. Remember that green thread car traffic demo? That was cute. It's unfortunate the tyranny of C never let M2 break through. Opinion is that the software world would would be in better shape now if M2 had gotten a real foothold.
- kcartlidge 6y ago
  > Remember that green thread car traffic demo? Indeed - I still have the software (though the disks are long gone). A few years back I even rewrote that demo in C# (console app) because why not. Edit: Anders Heljsberg is responsible for C# and TypeScript. Prior to that he wrote what became Turbo Pascal and was chief architect on Delphi. Seems I can't escape his stuff.

codesnik 6y ago

Pascal is under-appreciated. TurboPascal was my first programming language/platform on PC (used 286 in 1994) and the only problem I had was lack of documentation on actual video and sound hardware, not with the language itself. I was surprised to learn that many DOS-era games I loved were written in pascal actually, some of them were pretty performant (Tyrian, for example). Almost on the topic: in Russia there were popular school computers UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC, pdp-11 clones with deep changes, with an RT-11 compatible OS. They were everywhere, well into late 199x, when they were deeply obsolete, because schools didn't have funding to upgrade classrooms. It was my first computing platform when I was a kid, but the only language accessible was BASIC, with a line editor (pretty strange concept nowadays), line numbers, no named subroutines, etc. In 1997 I was suprised to find in a new school I've transfered to the same old computer but with Pascal compiler on it. With an actual editor, a very fast compilation time, and all still crammed into 64kb of memory. I was really impressed.

mobilio 6y ago
Here in Bulgaria we had Pravetz computers and Pascal was learned in past on schools.

jksmith 6y ago

Oh, the tricks I pulled off with TP back in the late 80's-early 90's. Paged memory managers, HP inkjet and pcl libraries, text window managers, parsers, compressors, sorts and searches, my youngest son as a toddler thinking the 3.5 floppy on my work machine was a slot to put quarters...Fun stuff, good times.

jdhzzz 6y ago

Title should have been: Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice

DennisP 6y ago

When I was in high school, I wrote lots of stuff in BASICA and spent long hours with printouts spread over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to figure out what was going wrong. I'd seen articles about "structured programming" and felt it would stifle my creativity. One dad Dad brought home Turbo Pascal. To try it out I implemented Conway's Game of Life. Once I got past my syntax errors, I was shocked when it worked correctly the very first time. I never wrote another line of BASICA.

qwerty456127 6y ago

I didn't know Turbo Pascal was available on CP/M. In case it was I bet it's the best language available there.

analog31 6y ago

I first learned BASIC in high school, learned Pascal shortly after that. I think a great thing about Pascal was its origin as a teaching language. As a result, the textbooks placed a heavy emphasis on learning good programming techniques, and the language supported those techniques. I think maybe it's no mere coincidence that good teaching tools also become good general tools for those of us who are not destined to become full time pro's. Learning BASIC and Pascal side by side was a great lesson in how to write good code, because you could make your Pascal programs so much more readable and organized. Even today, if any human has a faint hope of reading and using my code (in Python or C), it's thanks to the skills I learned from Pascal. When I got my first computer, a non-PC-compatible MS-DOS machine, I remember my dad asking me some vague questions about it. He had heard us talk about Pascal (my mom and brother both learned it), and the Wall Street Journal had a glowing article about it. He had no idea what it was, but got me it for my birthday. And it followed the "rules" of MS-DOS, so it ran on my weird computer! No graphics, but who cares, I was up and running with Pascal. I found a magazine article on how to attach a serial port to my computer, wrote a terminal emulator in Pascal, and found an old 300 baud modem. I was able to complete my computer assignments from my dorm room. In FORTRAN.

icedchai 6y ago

I remember using Turbo Pascal in high school, in my AP Computer Science class. This was in the early 90's, running on a PS/2 model 30 (8mhz 8086.) It was lighting fast, even on those low end machines that were several years old at the time! Fun times.

ubermonkey 6y ago

My assumption is that a HUGE chunk of developers around my age (50) started out with line-numbered GWBASIC or similar, and then had Turbo Pascal as their first "real" language. I have had a million technical books in my life, and I held on to many of them for a long time past their technical viability just out of sentimentality. Now I limit myself to half a shelf. On that shelf are my well-worn K&R, a similarly dogeared very early O'Reilly Perl book, the Peter Norton Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC, and a Waite Group book on Turbo Pascal 5.5.

casid 6y ago

Turbo Pascal was my first programming language, I remember hacking together small games with it and sharing them at school on floppy disks. It's a shame what Embarcadero has done to Turbo Pascal's successor Delphi. It's really an amazing language if it weren't for the god awful IDE. If you're happen to still work on Delphi enterprise software I'd highly recommend to have a look at OmniPascal (https://www.omnipascal.com/ https://www.omnipascal.com/), a very smart VisualStudio code plugin. It's a gem that provides JetBrains-like quality completions/refactorings for Delphi/Pascal.

mikewarot 6y ago

My first real project in Turbo Pascal was a system to record the inspection of Fire Protection Equipment in Coal Fired Generating Stations (where small fires break out all the time due to the coal dust everywhere). I wrote a set of routines to allow field based text editing, and built up a CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) database of locations, routes, equipment. I took 4 weeks instead of the two I estimated. The customer loved it, it met all the requirements... and was totally impractical as a system. I spent the next year rewriting it in a fairly agile manner working for the Russ, Assistant Plant Manager. He taught me how to make user friendly software in a simple manner... we would pull a person from the plant and say something like "This is Mike... he wrote this program. [Worker Name], I don't expect you to be a computer expert, it's not your job... I want you to do X,Y and Z... If something goes wrong, it's Mike's fault" "Press F1 for Help" was ALWAYS at the top of the screen after the first 5 seconds of the first user trying things and not knowing what to do. I learned an amazing amount about writing software from Russ. One time... he asked "what would happen if I disconnected it right now?" I didn't know, and said so.... I got that taken care of in the next week. You could disconnect at any time, and never lose a record. It was a fun job.

davidhbolton 6y ago

I bought this (back in 1986 I think) and used it on a Tatung Einstein running CP/M. I absolutely loved it and went on with TP 4.0, 5.0, 5.5 and 7 then switched to Delphi.