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In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread
40hz:
How many of us cut our baby teeth on one (or both) of these two classic development tools?
In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread TurboPascal - long before C or Visual-anything, this was the go-to language for developing "real" PC apps.
Or at least it was if you didn't want to be writing them in Assembly Language. ;D
In rememberance of....The antiquated hardware/software reminiscence thread
And for serious database applications, FoxPro (pre-Microsoft!) was the only choice if you wanted power and speed.
f0dder:
I started programming using Turbo Pascal 6 - Borland's IDEs were lightyears ahead of the competition back then, and the compiler was pretty fast (faster than Borland C++). Also, a really cool feature was "build-to-memory", which was great during run-debug-modify development cycles, since harddrives were PIO and amazingly slow back then. Integrated help was also very nice. The generated code was, as usual with Pascal/Delphi, relatively sucky, though... so you used "sally's peephole optimizer", customized runtime, and often had to resort to writing assembly snippets when you needed speed.
I also used Borland Pascal 7 (note the turbo->borland rename after v6), which unfortunately dropped the compile-to-memory functionality. Did a bit of 16bit DPMI programming, but found it too limiting - this is why I ended up switching to C++, and frankly I never looked back.
40hz:
and often had to resort to writing assembly snippets when you needed speed.
-f0dder (March 08, 2010, 02:28 PM)
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Too true! :Thmbsup: I should have said "...if you didn't want to be writing them entirely in Assembly Language.
BTW: Is Sally's peephole optimizer the same thing as something I knew as Sally TPU? That came after I stopped doing anything with Turbo. I think 4 or 5 was the last version I used. (It was whichever was the first one to have the 'blue' background.) But I remember how some friends used to rave about it.
After TurboPascal I went to Topspeed Modula2 and from there to Clarion Professional Developer before I mostly stopped coding and got into network and infrastructure projects.
f0dder:
Yep, it is :)
It was a pretty interesting program, especially for it's time - there wasn't nearly as much stuff (freely) available on compiler optimization, and Borland's TPU library format wasn't officially documented... SPO actually optimized the intermediate code in TPU files (which would then be linked to .exes), it wasn't just a "unit full of optimized functions".
cranioscopical:
TurboPascal - long before C or Visual-anything
-40hz (March 08, 2010, 02:18 PM)
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I'd been looking at Microsoft Pascal that cost around $400 at the time, I believe.
Then Phillipe Kahn came along with Turbo Pascal and I'm pretty sure I paid $69 for it!!
Turbo Pascal and Sidekick :o
btw, I think this thread is misnamed, it ought to be
In remembrance of....The antiquated hardware/software users' reminiscence thread.
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