5 ms·

Borland turbo c++ was pretty good, and v4 came with a ton of printed docs on the standard library.

zabzonk 5y ago
Indeed - completely forgot about that. Though Borland really dropped the ball later, with horrible non-standard extensions to the language. And of course many people in SE Asia are still being damaged by still being taught using Turbo C++ when they could be usefully using GCC or clang.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > And of course many people in SE Asia are still being damaged by still being taught using Turbo C++ when they could be usefully using GCC or clang. Reason number X for someone to work on semi-faithfully cloning that MS-DOS-era TUI interface so that it can work as an IDE on modern systems and compilers, piggibacking on things like LSP servers. It was done already for the Pascal version ("fp" ide), and we also have things like QB64. Hopefully it's just a matter of someone being inspired to do the work.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    I forgot, until now, that once upon a time I was building & packaging xwpe for sco osr5 for a while. https://web.archive.org/web/20160321050842/http://www.aljex.com/bkw/sco/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160321050842/http://www.aljex.... It's like an X11 rendition of the Borland tui. It didn't have a logo or icon so I made one. (several crap ones actually) Now the modern system I was using that emulated-old-thing on is itself even older than turboc was at the time.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Nice. Software homepage is still up at http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/ http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/ (with self-signed https), screenshots at http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/screenshots.html http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/screenshots.html . FAQ about the original software preserved at https://web.archive.org/web/20030402074122/http://www.astro.umd.edu:80/~flynnk/xwpe-faq.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030402074122/http://www.astro.... (from 2003(!), later versions are 404s). Ironically enough, the homepage itself describes this as a fork aiming to continue maintenance since the previous author of the software had stopped responding to inquiries about it. A perfect example, if perhaps a regrettably short-lived one, of how ensuring the Right to Fork can help address concerns about FLOSS maintainership.
      - Brian_K_White 5y ago
        I agree. All the arguments about the difficulty or practicality of maintaining things in the open world where there's too much stuff, none of that matters at all. How difficult or likely or realistic or useful-today something is doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is the difference between possible and not-possible. What anyone does or doesn't do with that which is possible is no excuse to tolerate, let alone advocate, things being not-possible.
      - stockerta 5y ago
        A couple of months ago I started to convert xwpe to use wide charachters as a means to dust of my ancient c skills. I should finish it.
WalterBright 5y ago
Borland came out much later than Zortech C++. Borland abandoned their own OOP extensions to C when they saw how well ZTC++ was selling.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  In my not-so-humble opinion, it is ZTC++ that cemented C++ as the leading OOP successor to C. Before ZTC++, ObjectiveC and C++ were neck and neck (judging by traffic on newsgroups). Borland and Microsoft were both investigating their own C-derived OOP languages. ZTC++ came out, and a ton of magazine articles came out about C++ using Zortech C++. ObjectiveC fell away, and most of the C++ programming was in ZTC++.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    Well (as of course you well know) you are right. But people have all sorts of reasons for making the success of a product - my boss at the BBC bought a copy of ZTC++ because he liked the text editor that came with it (it did, didn't it, or am I finally going Deolali?) - he never wrote a line of C++ himself.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Yeah, it had ZED the text editor. I still used microEmacs myself :-) My partner liked ZED, so it was all good.
  - lallysingh 5y ago
    I remember reading hints of prior extensions in BC++. I remember they kept their message dispatch hacks for windows. E.g. virtual void foo() =[WM_USER+11].
pjmlp 5y ago
All versions came like that.

Indeed - completely forgot about that. Though Borland really dropped the ball later, with horrible non-standard extensions to the language. And of course many people in SE Asia are still being damaged by still being taught using Turbo C++ when they could be usefully using GCC or clang.

zozbot234 5y ago
> And of course many people in SE Asia are still being damaged by still being taught using Turbo C++ when they could be usefully using GCC or clang. Reason number X for someone to work on semi-faithfully cloning that MS-DOS-era TUI interface so that it can work as an IDE on modern systems and compilers, piggibacking on things like LSP servers. It was done already for the Pascal version ("fp" ide), and we also have things like QB64. Hopefully it's just a matter of someone being inspired to do the work.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  I forgot, until now, that once upon a time I was building & packaging xwpe for sco osr5 for a while. https://web.archive.org/web/20160321050842/http://www.aljex.com/bkw/sco/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160321050842/http://www.aljex.... It's like an X11 rendition of the Borland tui. It didn't have a logo or icon so I made one. (several crap ones actually) Now the modern system I was using that emulated-old-thing on is itself even older than turboc was at the time.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Nice. Software homepage is still up at http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/ http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/ (with self-signed https), screenshots at http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/screenshots.html http://identicalsoftware.com/xwpe/screenshots.html . FAQ about the original software preserved at https://web.archive.org/web/20030402074122/http://www.astro.umd.edu:80/~flynnk/xwpe-faq.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030402074122/http://www.astro.... (from 2003(!), later versions are 404s). Ironically enough, the homepage itself describes this as a fork aiming to continue maintenance since the previous author of the software had stopped responding to inquiries about it. A perfect example, if perhaps a regrettably short-lived one, of how ensuring the Right to Fork can help address concerns about FLOSS maintainership.
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      I agree. All the arguments about the difficulty or practicality of maintaining things in the open world where there's too much stuff, none of that matters at all. How difficult or likely or realistic or useful-today something is doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is the difference between possible and not-possible. What anyone does or doesn't do with that which is possible is no excuse to tolerate, let alone advocate, things being not-possible.
    - stockerta 5y ago
      A couple of months ago I started to convert xwpe to use wide charachters as a means to dust of my ancient c skills. I should finish it.

WalterBright 5y ago

Borland came out much later than Zortech C++. Borland abandoned their own OOP extensions to C when they saw how well ZTC++ was selling.

WalterBright 5y ago
In my not-so-humble opinion, it is ZTC++ that cemented C++ as the leading OOP successor to C. Before ZTC++, ObjectiveC and C++ were neck and neck (judging by traffic on newsgroups). Borland and Microsoft were both investigating their own C-derived OOP languages. ZTC++ came out, and a ton of magazine articles came out about C++ using Zortech C++. ObjectiveC fell away, and most of the C++ programming was in ZTC++.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  Well (as of course you well know) you are right. But people have all sorts of reasons for making the success of a product - my boss at the BBC bought a copy of ZTC++ because he liked the text editor that came with it (it did, didn't it, or am I finally going Deolali?) - he never wrote a line of C++ himself.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Yeah, it had ZED the text editor. I still used microEmacs myself :-) My partner liked ZED, so it was all good.
- lallysingh 5y ago
  I remember reading hints of prior extensions in BC++. I remember they kept their message dispatch hacks for windows. E.g. virtual void foo() =[WM_USER+11].

pjmlp 5y ago

All versions came like that.