Talk:Turbo Pascal

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[edit] Philippe Kahn's Role

Community, it is a bit absurd to have a Turbo pascal page that doesn't have Philippe Kahn's critical role brought out. This is a guy who is a key innovator in the high tech industry, who seems to have done it before, micral and after.... In reading this, there was the Danish offering, but nothing would have happened and it would have remained an obscure offering if Turbo Pascal had not come along. In fact the IDE in Compass pascal was super primitive, a simple command line interface. Many would say that the success of Turbo Pascal (over the Danish offering) was it's incredible edit->compile-> debug cycle. The Wordstar compatible editor was key at the time. I know that it was for me. The turbo Pascal compiler generated sloppy code compared to Pascal MT+ but the editor and the IDE turned it into a productivity machine. Un-matched today. That is I believe the key contribution of Philippe Kahn.

On another note, Kahn has continually stood up against Microsoft from day one. Unfortunately some of the key players in this story had switched sides and joined Microsoft (with huge signing bonuses...). Therefore there is huge pressure to rewrite history and minimize the contributions of anyone who stood up to the empire. Those dynamics are pretty obvious as history gets re-written. In fact even the person running Borland right now, Tod Nielsen, used to compete with Kahn in the early days. It's like a complete take-over. Our role here should be to get the facts correctly and not repeat re-written history by the "victorious empire". Just a word of caution.

Noted. It's not that we particularly want to minimise Phillipe's contribution. It's just that we write what we know about. I know a little about the relationship between BLS Pascal, Compas and Turbo Pascal which is why I brought up the connection between the products and the role of Anders. Since you know something about Phillipe's role you should add that. That's the way that Wikipedia works. Of course it's best if you can cite some book to avoid accusations of Original Research but that's another story. By the way could you add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comments. It signs them and more importantly shows where they stop and other peoples' replies start. Cheers -- Derek Ross | Talk 05:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, this article promotes Kahn as the IDE innovator, while I've also seen this been credited to Borland co founder Niels Jensen (of JPI fame), at least the implementation. So what did Kahn do exactly? Btw note that the bad codegeneration and speed are somewhat linked. Optimization can take more time than the basic parsing+cg. 88.159.74.100 08:35, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Turbo Pascal, also known as Borland Pascal"

I don't think this phrase is quite accurate. At least here in the UK they sold Turbo Pascal (in red box) for one price, and Borland Pascal (in a blue box) for a considerably higher price. I think the difference is that the latter had lots more libraries and other features (it was intended to be the "professional" product). I've not updated the article, as I'm not sure enough about the details to make a worthwhile addition. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:59, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

  • Finlay is right, however BP is 100% TP compatible, it is more or less a more powerful "enterprise" version. It is (TP7 +TPW7 + TPX (protected mode IDE + compiler) + tasm + resource workshop + more goodies )
  • There maybe should be a small paragraph were the differences between TP and standard pascal are listed, I'll see if I can come up with something. It should be a line of 25, no more.
  • Turbo/Borland Pascal has been sold for years after 1995 (and maybe still). It is just that the main focus of Borland Pascal development department changed to Delphi. (TP/BP was and is still used heavily in dos software that is embedded or packaged with machines, and in education) -- Marco van de Voort.

[edit] Page move

Please discuss the reasons why you want to make a page move before doing so. This article was originally conceived as an article on Turbo Pascal. If you want to discuss its later differentiation into personal (Turbo) and enterprise (Borland) editions and the final amalgamation of those editions under the single name Borland Pascal, that's excellent but note that the rebranding of Turbo Pascal as Borland Pascal took place some time after the introduction of the product. It certainly was not known as Borland Pascal for the first few years of its life and that is why the most appropriate title for this article is Turbo Pascal, the name with which it was associated in the public mind throughout its product life. -- Derek Ross | Talk 04:10, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

IMHO, don't. The product is fully the same base, and "turbo pascal" is also a very differentiated brand (think TP in 7 basic versions, and then with/without extender and -W versions). So simply keep both TP and BP here. -- Marco van de Voort

Turbo Pascal made a historic impact on the early personal computer worldwide. Borland Pascal was essentially a moderately successful attempt to segment the market and sell a similar product form a much higher price. Most programmers around the word have heard about Turbo Pascal, most wouldn't know what Borland Pascal was. In fact Borland itself (now Codegear) relaunched the "Turbo" brands because they are some of the most recognized brands in the developer community.

[edit] Bard's Tale

I removed this comment:

The IBM PC game The Bards Tale was written in Pascal.

from the article, becase:

  1. I've never heard it before
  2. It was out of place—it was in a paragraph by itself with no context
  3. It doesn't specify that it was written in Turbo Pascal, what this article is about
  4. It wasn't even wikilinked correctly (not a big deal, but there are several articles on The Bard's Tale).

To include the factoid in the article, I'm going to insist on a reference. If it was just written in Pascal, the factoid should go in the Pascal article. And lastly, if it was written with Turbo Pascal mention it and try to give it some context—like a bullet in a Trivia section.

I know Wizardry was written in Pascal, but I never heard that the MS-DOS version of The Bard's Tale was. — Frecklefoot | Talk 14:29, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removed POV section

I removed the POV paragraph below. If someone wants to take a crack at NPOV'ing it and adding it back in, feel free. But I doubt it can be NPOV'ed. It's a rant. — Frecklefoot | Talk 15:16, May 4, 2005 (UTC)

Many of these features are still not in the IDEs that followed. The documentation for most of the languages is often poorly written, disorganized, and incomplete. The code profilers work sporadically and its quite easy to crash your system trying to single step through code. Inlining assembler is considered something unusual and freakish to do. These problems are particularly painful in the 'open source' IDEs but even Microsoft Visual Studio is a morass of confusion in comparison to the old Borland product. IDEs of the later years may never achieve the level of simplicity or integration as Borland Pascal, simply because the underlying systems of the newer IDEs are thousands of times more complex than the system Borland Pascal was written on - the IBM PC hardware and MS DOS software.

IMHO not entirely a rant. I think one could summarize it "The maturity (seven full versions) and the simplicity of the system simply allowed a way better (and more complete) finishing touch. Also the limited number of options keeps the TP/BP7 managable for new developers"

This is btw one of the reasons why TP/BP was used so much longer in educational roles when the Dos platform was already replaced largely by Windows. Only when newer generations increasingly missed any Dos/console experience, this started to decline swiftly. 88.159.74.100 08:22, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Competition with Microsoft Pascal

Then I (AntoineL, not Frecklefoot) also removed the section below. It was marked as unsourced in April [1], but nobody came. Since I was working on these tools then, I tried to modify it to make it NPOV'ed, but I fail. In fact it is just opinions, nothing here is really relevant about TP, it probably belongs to the Microsoft Pascal article (and I'll copy it to that talk page). The only real fact is that MS distributed the clone QP "for a while", but it is hardly relevant when looked at the whole picture of TP which spans more than 10 years; this information could be added to the Successors section, but I am myself non-neutral on this one and cannot resolve at doing it.

Of course you are free to disagree, to bring it back in and improve the article. AntoineL 16:55, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

===2.3 Competition with Microsoft Pascal===
It is likely that Microsoft Pascal was dropped because of the competition provided by Turbo Pascal's good quality and low price.[citation needed] Another theory is that Borland made an agreement with Microsoft to drop development of Turbo BASIC, a BASIC IDE that stems from Turbo Pascal, if Microsoft would stop developing Microsoft Pascal. For a while, Microsoft produced QuickPascal, which was almost 100% compatible with Turbo Pascal.[citation needed]

[edit] Original price

Having owned a copy of Turbo Pascal 1.0, I remember the original price as $29.95 rather than $49.95. Can anybody confirm?

A google search in the newsgroups resulted in several messages that say that it was $49.95. bogdan | Talk 18:01, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
They have the original advertising at Borland Museum and it was indeed $49.95. bogdan | Talk 18:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Turbo Pascal $49.95 + $5 shipping and handling

I think you are thinking of another publisher of low priced languages that advertised a Pascal product for $29 shortly after Borland starting getting press for Turbo Pascal being a great value. The name was "USDC"? I believe they offered other languages too such as Basic and Fortran.

I do not think that this is correct. The original Turbo Pascal ad that ran in the November 1983 issue of Byte Magazine has a comparison chart. The two competitive offerings are a cheap one: JRT Pascal, selling for $29,95 and an expensive one, Pascal MT+ (The optimizing compiler that all pros of the time were using) selling for $495. The urban legend says that Turbo Pascal was the cheapest. That ad shows that it wasn't. JRT was. It was a decent compiler. In fact the compiler produced as adequate code as Turbo did, but it had no rapid edit->compile->debug cycle with a Wordstar editor that was "pascal-savvy".

See JRT for the reasons why JRT Pascal failed. With JRT out of the way, price was a major factor in TP's success.Chris Burrows 13:22, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I checked the JRT page. It's not complete. JRT became Nevada Pascal and then Mystic Pascal. The reason that they failed was more business management than anything. They essentially charged customers and didn't ship products. After months of doing so, they eventually closed shop. Nevada and Mystic Pascal went the same way. So in many ways, Turbo, MT+ were "business-viable". JRT wasn't. That's the general recollection.

UCSD Pascal is a complete different subject and very relevant here. In fact this is a p-code system that was very efficient for interactive development. The compilation to p-code was very quick. UCSD was undoubtedly a key influence in the design of the Turbo development system (not the compiler). Remember that Niklaus Wirth and Philippe Kahn were both associated with these efforts when Anders was in grade school.

Philippe Kahn was not associated with the development of UCSD Pascal, nor have I ever found any evidence whatsoever that he studied under Niklaus Wirth, or made any contribution to the ETH-Zurich Pascal compilers. Kahn studied Maths at ETH - a different department from Wirth's altogether.Chris Burrows 13:22, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

That seems quite incorrect Chris. Some of us have seen Niklaus Wirth and Philippe Kahn interacting together first hand. Certainly when "The World of Objects" was filmed and Wirth was on video, he and Kahn were like the old professor and the old student.

You certainly have a vivid imagination, Mr Anon! You seem to be adding 2 and 2 together and getting 64. The video can be seen at http://www.turboexplorer.com/worldofobjects. Niklaus Wirth is not even acknowledged as being the creator of Pascal - "Leading Computer Scientist" indeed! Chris Burrows 00:14, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

In fact Wirth sees kahn as one of his brightest students. Apparently the ETH requires all first year students to take a programming class, that was true in teh 70s. the choices are the ETH were the traditional Fortran class or the new "Pascal class" with Wirth. That was apparently a very small class and that got involved in using and editing the user manual as well as improving and extending the first compiler.

OK. That is much closer to the truth than the sweeping generalisation "Niklaus Wirth and Philippe Kahn were both associated with these efforts" that could be interpreted as they were equally involved. Wirth's postgraduate students who are officially credited with actually implementing the compilers (not just dissecting them for class exercises) were Edouard Marmier (the first unsuccessful FORTRAN version), Urs Ammann and Rudy Schild (the CDC compiler) and Urs Ammann, Kesav Nori and Christian Jacobi (the P-Code compilers used as the basis for the UCSD Pascal compiler). Ref: "Recollections about the Development of Pascal" by N. Wirth (1993): http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=155378 Chris Burrows 00:14, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

In the 70s there was no such thing as "computer science". People were mathematicians, Physicists. That makes sense. On UCSD it seems that the connection is with Wirth. That needs to be double-checked.

Double-checking is not difficult. Google for "Ken Bowles ucsd" or http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/ or http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/Pascal.asp.

Understood. However there is nothing there that confirms or infirms anything. Clearly Kahn spent 3+ years in undergraduate days in Zurich starting in 69/70 and worked under Wirth. So surely an undergraduate student would work with/for the graduate students. that's all pretty reasonable.

[edit] IDE

I still have a copy of the original Nascom cassette based compiler and I have used the Compass compiler for CP/M. I can assure everyone that the user interface design of the IDE was basically the same for them as for Turbo Pascal proper. -- Derek Ross | Talk 17:59, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Derek, that is not correct. All versions of Compass Pascal, early and late, had a command line interface integrated in them, which hardly made an IDE. To us developers in the early 80s the magic of Turbo Pascal was its IDE and in particular the "Wordstar Compatibe Editor". the compiler itself was fairly trivial in that it generated sloppy code and was limited to 64K for a long time. There was no real linker and the systems would link the whole runtime library...Hence, the smallest executable that you could build, "Hello World" was much bigger than what you could do with an optimizing compiler. In fact most of us would use Turbo for rapid development but do the final compile and linking with other tools. The magic of Turbo was it's edit->compile->debug fast cycle using a familiar and fast editor. That's something that none of the Compas and Poly tools could do and nothing that the optimizing compilers could do. The Poly/Compas tools failed in the market because they produced poor code, failed in the fast development cycle and yet were priced very high. Price was never an issue as for all of us pro developers we owned every tool and used the best one. Turbo was always used for rapid development. The optimizing compilers for final production and the others never used. Note that in the cycle described, "edit" comes first.....

BTW, that wordstar-compatible editor was actually written by Mogen Glad. Mogen Glad was an Borland employee and in some of the lore a co-founder of Borland. Heilsberg owned with a partner several computer stores in Cophenhagen called "Polydata Centers". He actually apparently only became part of Borland when he moved to the use in the later 80s, several years later. According to due diligence documents from the first Borland IPO, the contract between Polydata and Borland was "secret". In other words it seems to be that Polydata wanted to maintain their prices on Compass pascal for which they had a contract with the Danish education system and claim that the two products had nothing to do with each other. This would be the explanation why until the later 80s Heilsberg doesn't appear anywhere with Borland. Apparently the computert stores went bankrupt and then Heilsberg decided to join Borland. That's quite a colourful story!

[edit] Timer bug

It is a know fact that Turbo Pascal has a bug in the delay system call that causes programs compiled with it to crash in fast computers, and that a patch is available. However, I can't see any reference to it in the article. Somebody more knowledgeable than me should write it. --Pezezin 15:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

iirc it has something to do with the crt unit but i'm not entirely sure what. Plugwash 17:57, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
It was a bug in initialization section of Crt unit. This initialization was needed to make Delay procedure work properly -- you have to measure CPU speed for this. There are various ways to correct this. I used crtfix program. It allows you to patch already compiled exe programs (i.e. you don't have to recompile them from sources, which is handy when you don't have the sources :) ), it also allows you to patch your Crt unit so that future compiled programs are OK. And it comes with sources, freeware. Oh, and the readme for crtfix describes what's the cause of this bug in much greater detail. You can download crtfix e.g. from here. MichalisKamburelis 08:22, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] usuing built-in assembler ?

Articles reads like one could use builtin assembler in Turbo Pascal since v.1.0 At least one could use integrated debugger to trace assembler parts of PAscal program. 1) AFAIR asm keyword introduced in TP7. At least TP 3.0 and 5.5 coud not use buiilt-in assebler. You had to use hex-coded x86 binary opcodes (Inline keyword) or link separately assembled .OBJ files. But then You could not debug then line-by-line. 2) Integrated debugger since beginning ? Did it appeared in TP4 ?

asm keyword introduced in TP7

IIRC so-called "BASM", the integrated assembler, came in with version 6.0 (1990). Before that, and at least it was there in version 3.0 (not sure about 2.0 or 1.0), there was the so-called "inline assembler", which was not a real assembler (since it did not understand mnemonics like MOV or CALL) but permitted insertion of any opcode bytes inside the code stream, and had a basic scheme to link with variable and similar symbols. It persisted until Delphi 1.0, and was not kept in the 32-bit rewrite of the compiler.

link separately assembled .OBJ files. But then You could not debug then line-by-line.

.OBJ linking of OMF files (traditional Intel-based format) was introduced in version 4.0; the debug informations (Borland dialect) inside the .OBJ file carried toward the debugger was possible with version 5.0.
Version 3.0 (and perhaps before) just permitted the linking in of raw chunk of bytes, so-called .BIN (graphics was added to Turbo 3.0 with this very hack.)

Integrated debugger

"Integrated debugging" is really a feature of the IDE: since it allows (from day 1) to run the compiled program from within Turbo, the first environment gaved some kind of support here. Then with TP4 came the windowed environment, much improved with TP5 (along with the standalone TurboDebugger which alleviates the memory constraints.)
Article could be rewritten to drop the bad impression you're felling, but there is no definitive milestone which can be marked as "introduction of assembler" or "debugger"; features were improved over versions. -- AntoineL 15:27, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Turbo "Inline assember support" was an important part of its success. For example it allowed development of TSR products with a few hacks of the run-time libraries. That was unique to Turbo Pascal and much harder to do with Pascal MT+. Essentially impossible with the Microsoft compiler.

[edit] "version 1.0" section covers ALL versions

What's up with the version 1.0 section? It goes on to talk about inline assembler, the profiler -- the reader not already familiar with Turbo Pascal would think that all of this was available in 1983 with version 1.0! This needs to be fixed. Trixter 15:48, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, it was a key part of the success of Turbo: The support of "inline assembler". That was key to building some of the more sophisticated applications of the time. Not to be overlooked.

[edit] Did Kahn devise the IDE ?

I'm not convinced. My copy of the Polydata Blue Label Software predecessor to Turbo Pascal has a very similar IDE. So did the Compas Pascal compiler that was sold for the Gemini CP/M systems and that was before he got involved. I get the feeling that this is one of these "deliberate mistakes" that people add to Wikipedia in order to test us out. -- Derek Ross | Talk 06:10, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Derek, the Danish product has a command line interface... No integrated interactive Wordstar-compatible editor. The key to us Turbo programmers was that fast edit->compile->debug cycle. The compiler produced crappy code. There were no optimizations. In fact people such as myself used to do all development in Turbo and then use an optimizing compiler with a serious code generator to compile the final code.... So all the emphasis on the compiler being great is a bit absurd. As pro developers, we always disliked that compiler. In fact we couldn't even use overlays for a while. the genius of Turbo Pascal was the "Turbo Development Cycle", not the code generator! -- (unsigned by Anon)

Take a look at the BLS Pascal manual if you doubt the resemblance. The biggest differences of BLS from Turbo were that the built-in editor wasn't Wordstar-compatible and that you had to press Enter after entering the command letter (or command word if you wanted to type the whole command). However the edit->compile->debug cycle was identical for BLS and for Turbo. The "command line interface" was part of the program not part of the host operating system. So Kahn changed the editor to a WS-compatible one and changed the command line interface so that you didn't need to press Enter but that's about it. -- Derek Ross | Talk 00:27, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

That's not quite correct Derek. The wordstar editor is a a great piece of software. All writeen in assembler. This has nothing to do with the Danish product. Not a line in common. I would say that the Danish product is based on a fast compiler that produces adequate code, Turbo is based around a great program editor, with some knowledge of the Pasacl syntax, interfaced to the Danish compiler. I have them running boath side by side on my early PC. The differences from a conceptual model are obvious. I don't think that this takes away anything from the work that Anders did, but our goal here is to seek what is right and not take sides. -- (unsigned by Anon)

Fair enough. I don't mean to take sides nor to take anything away from the significant improvements made to the Wordstar-compatible Turbo editor. There's no doubt that the its editor was an excellent piece of work and a great improvement on the BLS editor. I just want to clarify the similarities and the differences between the two products. -- Derek Ross | Talk 08:13, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I think that we agree. In fact I just checked and the Wordstar editor is 18K of assembler language. I also checked how complete it is and it's got 95% of Wordstar commands and Pascal-oriented extensions. That's quite an achievement! In any case, we pro developers spend most of our time staring at code.... The compiler is disposable and we'd trade anyone for one that will produce ultimately better code as the Wirth adage goes: "Software slows down much faster than hardware speeds up"! The point is that there are some very good reasons why Turbo became so successful. And I contend that it wasn't the compiler. As you point out that had been around for a couple of years and all pros knew about it. We all got a copy of it as well as JRT, MT+, MS, IBM and all others. We ended-up using what really worked. And it wasn't the cheapest as JRT was 2/3 of the price.... That's always surprised me the mis-conception that Borland was cutting prices. they weren't they came in 50+% higher priced than their competitor (JRT) and had with a compiler that had been around for a couple of years.

In fact I just checked and the Wordstar editor is 18K of assembler language.

The Editor toolbook shipped as an add-on for TP4, and it included so-called binary editor which was nothing else than the Wordstar editor repacked.
And the binary blob was 13K of code. AntoineL 15:21, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
See JRT for the reasons why JRT Pascal failed. With JRT out of the way, price was a major factor in TP's success.Chris Burrows 13:34, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

What was new was the incredible productivity that we all got from the edit->compile->debug cycles.

Run, not Debug, and hardly new - UCSD was several years ahead by way of integrating an Edit>Compile>Debug system. It was already at V4 when I started using it in 1983. However, UCSD's success on the IBM-PC was limited by its higher cost (about $400) and the relatively slow speed of the interpreted p-code executables compared with the TP COM files. Although UCSD Pascal was available on a very wide range of microcomputers (including non-Intel systems) this advantage over TP was soon eliminated when the IBM-PC became the dominant microcomputer systemChris Burrows 13:34, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually not quite... Of course run... But one of the key features of Turbo Pascal is that when "Run fails" it pin-points an error message right into the source code with a line number.... That's something that the Danish product did not do... And a very key advantage of Turbo pascal for us pro developers. That's why we spend most of our time in the editor: We write and we debug in the editor. Turbo was the first system that was compiled to executable code and provided that facility. UCSD did in some ways but as discussed produced p-code. And you can't debug an executable or write low-level software like TSRs if you don't compile right to executable (and provide the ability to use inline assembler code)....

True enough. BLS Pascal jumps into the source code for compile errors but it only returns an error position in the object code for run time errors. -- Derek Ross | Talk 05:03, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

In other words, the editor (where you spend 95% of your time as a developer) was the central part of Turbo Pascal and all the effort was on thsat side as far as innovation was concerned. That's in IMHO the genius of Turbo Pascal. And that we need to surface in the article I think at least. If Turbo Pascal had just been a cheap good compiler it would have been forgotten like MT+, JRT, Compass etc.... It was a great productivity tool. We all found that to be true.

[edit] Another version was available for the DEC Rainbow?

The DEC Rainbow ran CPM and (Microsoft) DOS, and had both a Z80 and an 8086 processor. Turbo Pascal 3.0 was available for Z-80 and 8088/8086, CPM and DOS. There were Graphics extensions for the IBM PC. Were there any specific extensions for the DEC Rainbow, or was that just an example of a DOS/CPM machine that could run Turbo Pascal? The normal Turbo Pascal IDE did not use hardware acceleration or direct graphics: it was a very simple text mode interface that used OS text display. BTW, for high speed compilation I used a Fujuitsu 80186 'DOS compatible' running DOS 2.11 I didn't have 'another version' for that platform either.

[edit] Turbo

Turbo Pascal compiled and ran entirely in memory. In contrast, MS Pascal needed at least a Compiler Disk, a linker disk, and a source disk. Running on a single disk machine, the operator needed to load the compiler disk, load the source disk, write to the object disk, load the compiler disk again, write to the object disk, load the linker disk, write to the target disk. And you typically finished by reloading the DOS disk. Even on a two disk machine, the three pass compiler required disk swapping of the compiler and linker disks. The massive productivity improvement of Turbo Pascal 2 and 3 came firstly from the elimiation of disk swapping.

A limitation was that Turbo Pascal would stop at the first compilation error. Without a seperate listing file (and disk), and with only a single pass compiler, Turbo Pascal was unable to understand and report multiple errors.

The difference favoured TP. Although the MS product was flexible and powerful, TP, which didn't wait till the end of the file to report an error, was part of the trend from 'computer centre' computing to cheap fast interactive personal computing.

Well the better optimizing compiler of the time was Pascal MT+ by Digital Research, not the Microsoft product. We pros used MT+ for the final compile and Turbo for the quick development. That's how it was.

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Turbo Pascal 60 screenshot.gif

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[edit] Better examples needed

The examples on the page "use crt;"; however, all the (three) functions/procedures in the example code are standard Pascal stuff and none of them are certainly in the crt module. However, I don't have TP anymore, so I cannot test better examples. --213.139.171.67 10:09, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] free versions

Afaik a French version of 7.01 was freely available for a while from (then) inprise.fr. It can still be dled from the net and considered legal in most NGs. 88.159.74.100 08:16, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] undid bubba

Generally, it made the article longer without adding something important, which is bad. But in particular, the MS compiler did not take up "two floppies, one for each pass of the compiler.". On a single floppy machine (standard at the time), the process was: save file to disk. take out disk. insert compiler disk. take out compiler disk, insert source disk again. take out source disk, insert target disk. take out target disk, insert compiler disk. take out compiler disk, insert target disk. take out target disk, insert linker disk. take out linker disk, insert target disk. See? You had to swap between program disks and data disks. That required multiple disk swaps (more than two), not a floppy for 'each pass'. Also, not all people who owned MS Pascal stopped using it.150.101.166.15 07:16, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Turbo Pascal 60 screenshot.gif

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BetacommandBot (talk) 02:11, 12 February 2008 (UTC)