12 ms·
Basically two things: 1. It was better than the other stuff I had access to at the time. This is due more to the poor quality of the other stuff I had access
by amalcon 4y ago
Basically two things:
1. It was better than the other stuff I had access to at the time. This is due more to the poor quality of the other stuff I had access to at the time than any benefit of Turbo Pascal, but it still mattered.
2. There are pointers in it, but you aren't forced to use them for simple programs. Having encountered pointers early is a huge leg up when it comes time to work with something like C or assembler. Being forced to use them (as in C) makes the learning curve really steep. Something like Pascal, where you have pointers but you aren't forced to use them for the sorts of program a beginner will tend to write, seems to give both benefits.
- unwind 4y agoI learned C after years of first Basic, then MC68k assembler (Amiga 4ever etc). Pointers never seemed hard or confusing at all. :) #lifehack
- DanielHB 4y agoas someone who started out with turbo pascal I totally agree with this but I have to add an extra point that turbo pascal is an IDE you press F9 (I think?) and it runs your freaking code, press F8 (I think?) and you have a line-stepping debugger I started learning programming in 2003 in turbo pascal, already very outdated at the time. But it is still probably the most pragmatic choice for teaching pointer-based programming (it should be a crime to teach data structures in a language that doesn't have manual memory management)