4 ms·

I'm setting up a DX4 for messaround with Norton books and asm at the moment, so quite interested in this. The general purpose environments I know of from then w

by cturner 12y ago

I'm setting up a DX4 for messaround with Norton books and asm at the moment, so quite interested in this. The general purpose environments I know of from then would have been C, Turbo Pascal, Basic, ASM, and then probably some databasey things like Clipper, Foxpro. What do you feel was stronger for general purpose dev in that era than Turbo C? Even on OS/2 2.0/1, I can't think of a general purpose tool that would have been more effective than Visual C (but I wasn't actively developing myself then).

pjmlp 12y ago
Turbo Pascal, of course.
- cturner 12y ago
  OK, given, that's pretty cool. Although Pascal/Ada would be nicer if they had shorter tokens.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    I always favored readability over hieroglyphs. Code is read more times than written. Specially important when you need to act as fireman in foreign code, a common situation in consulting. Check Turbo Pascal 6.0 or 7.0 with Turbo Vision.
    - cturner 12y ago
      Hieroglyphs are not necessarily less readable than words. It's good to be able to build mental state, and the more verbose a language is, the more you need to dance between parsing mode and building mental state. Context shifting is expensive. Paging around is particularly exhausting. I spoke to one of the guys working on the K-language OS at a conference last week. He made the case that - once learnt - the grammar for K it is objectively simple to build mental state from compared to alternatives. I'm open to this being true. I didn't know about Turbo Vision - that's great. And cross-platform too. Thanks!
  - Dewie 12y ago
    Someone should make a front-end (preprocessor?) for Ada or a Pascal with braces et.al. Then publish it as a brand new systems programming language. (Optional: "inspired by Go".)
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      When I got to use C, the first thing I did was macros for new() and dispose() as wrappers for malloc() and free(). I couldn't understand that C compilers were so primitive that they forced each developer to give how much memory one wants to allocate. On the same year (1993), C++ was my escape hatch from C pain with a bit of Pascal safety back, since Turbo Pascal was stuck in PC world and everyone was ignoring the new Extended Pascal standard. EDIT: typo whats => wants
      - muyuu 12y ago
        The problem with Pascal was that it didn't have strongholds like C/C++. It was a good (better) general purpose language than C or C++ but then you needed inline ASM for more things as it didn't allow for pointer arithmetic. Borland dominating Pascal practice rather than any standards didn't help either, it just didn't translate well. When Borland withered it took Pascal/Delphi with it. At the end of the day success is attained in a market. This is basically a messy evolutionary system that is far from perfect and leaves a lot of noisy vestiges in its path, along with unjustly sacrificed unsung heroes. Look at Java, C++, the mobile platforms, etc. What a fucking mess. But it is the way it is.
        pjmlp 12y ago
        You could do pointer arithmetic in Turbo Pascal, but I agree with your overall description. That is why I eventually moved to C++ back then, it might have some warts, but feels way better than C in terms of safety and modular programming support. Nowadays I spend most of my time in JVM and .NET worlds.
        muyuu 12y ago
        IIRC pointer arithmetic in Turbo Pascal had some restrictions vs C (typing, limits). Still nothing of that was standard Pascal at least back then. You willingly spend your time in JVM world? ;-)
ido 12y ago
Back then the "default" languages for making dos programs were Turbo Pascal & QuickBasic. C was the 3rd place I guess.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  4th place. Assembly came before it. MASM and TASM were quite good.
aidenn0 12y ago
Here's the C compiler I used back in the day: http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm Also, Turbo Pascal had easily the best IDE for the day.

by cturner 12y ago

pjmlp 12y ago

Turbo Pascal, of course.

cturner 12y ago
OK, given, that's pretty cool. Although Pascal/Ada would be nicer if they had shorter tokens.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  I always favored readability over hieroglyphs. Code is read more times than written. Specially important when you need to act as fireman in foreign code, a common situation in consulting. Check Turbo Pascal 6.0 or 7.0 with Turbo Vision.
  - cturner 12y ago
    Hieroglyphs are not necessarily less readable than words. It's good to be able to build mental state, and the more verbose a language is, the more you need to dance between parsing mode and building mental state. Context shifting is expensive. Paging around is particularly exhausting. I spoke to one of the guys working on the K-language OS at a conference last week. He made the case that - once learnt - the grammar for K it is objectively simple to build mental state from compared to alternatives. I'm open to this being true. I didn't know about Turbo Vision - that's great. And cross-platform too. Thanks!
- Dewie 12y ago
  Someone should make a front-end (preprocessor?) for Ada or a Pascal with braces et.al. Then publish it as a brand new systems programming language. (Optional: "inspired by Go".)
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    When I got to use C, the first thing I did was macros for new() and dispose() as wrappers for malloc() and free(). I couldn't understand that C compilers were so primitive that they forced each developer to give how much memory one wants to allocate. On the same year (1993), C++ was my escape hatch from C pain with a bit of Pascal safety back, since Turbo Pascal was stuck in PC world and everyone was ignoring the new Extended Pascal standard. EDIT: typo whats => wants
    - muyuu 12y ago
      The problem with Pascal was that it didn't have strongholds like C/C++. It was a good (better) general purpose language than C or C++ but then you needed inline ASM for more things as it didn't allow for pointer arithmetic. Borland dominating Pascal practice rather than any standards didn't help either, it just didn't translate well. When Borland withered it took Pascal/Delphi with it. At the end of the day success is attained in a market. This is basically a messy evolutionary system that is far from perfect and leaves a lot of noisy vestiges in its path, along with unjustly sacrificed unsung heroes. Look at Java, C++, the mobile platforms, etc. What a fucking mess. But it is the way it is.
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        You could do pointer arithmetic in Turbo Pascal, but I agree with your overall description. That is why I eventually moved to C++ back then, it might have some warts, but feels way better than C in terms of safety and modular programming support. Nowadays I spend most of my time in JVM and .NET worlds.
        muyuu 12y ago
        IIRC pointer arithmetic in Turbo Pascal had some restrictions vs C (typing, limits). Still nothing of that was standard Pascal at least back then. You willingly spend your time in JVM world? ;-)

ido 12y ago

Back then the "default" languages for making dos programs were Turbo Pascal & QuickBasic. C was the 3rd place I guess.

pjmlp 12y ago
4th place. Assembly came before it. MASM and TASM were quite good.

aidenn0 12y ago

Here's the C compiler I used back in the day: http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm Also, Turbo Pascal had easily the best IDE for the day.