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  • Wait, you had working inline assembly in the old Turbo Pascal 3.0? I never knew.
    by spwa4
  • I guess today is Pascal's day.

    This website is full of goodies for anyone that cares about history of Niklaus Wirth created languages.

    by pjmlp
  • I had Turbo Pascal 2.0, back screen with yellow letters on DOS, didn't get the blue Borland IDE until a few years later, and I also had Microsoft QuickPascal. Wasn't 100% compatible with the games/graphics "tutes" of the time though.

    But, I ended up switching to Turbo C for the 'cool' factor, but in reality TP was a better way to go about what I was using it for.

    by bluedino
  • Is it right to say that Borland basically invented the IDE? I didn't use Turbo Pascal but did have a copy of Turbo C back in the day and that was certainly the first IDE-like programming environment I can remember.
    by SoftTalker
  • Simlar language, compatible with MSDOS, CP/M and Unix:

    https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html

    by anthk
  • Pascal will always have my heart. My first bridge outside Basic (I was stuck with a home pc so didn’t go down the assembly rabbit hole like others of my generation). Turbo Pascal’s IDE. Add it possible for a kid to learn and create in a way I never would have done if stuck with a collection of semi independent tools. for those who say just use the command line - this was 1989. DOS was not exactly today’s modern shell environment!
    by jshaqaw
  • Small machines eh?

    How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32 LCD and a piezo buzzer. Serial and parallel ports available and a FDD. It also has a ROM card slot. And a card was developed, the only third-party ROM for this platform, by one Hans Larsson in Sweden, in the late 1980s.

    A 64k ROM with:

    - a mostly TP 5.5 compatible Pascal compiler, crt and friends

    - inline assembly

    - units, loadable libraries and all

    - debugger

    - full-screen editor, global search and replace, etc.

    - visual file manager

    - CLI with redirection and rudimentary shell scripting - variables, conditionals, arguments

    While the hardware platform is somewhat available and there is a very good emulator, due to "issues", the DL-Pascal ROM is not at this time publicly available and only a chosen few have access to it. Luckily there is a preservation effort underway.

    by wowczarek
  • I purchased Turbo Pascal 3 for Amstrad CPC 6128 with my pocket money back in 1989(?). That was 1000 FF back then (~275€ today) so quite a big sum for a teenager. My dad took pity on me and funded 50% of it. Best investment ever!

    Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally compute 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC).

    I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind.

    It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).

    by nlehuen

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