Turbo Pascal (implementation)

Software
1

From a comment on HN which has many interesting details

For all who wonder why Turbo Pascal was so fast here some insights:

50% is certainly due to the language Pascal itself. Niklaus Wirth designed the language in a way so it can be compiled in a single pass. In general the design of Pascal is in my opinion truly elegant

…
Back then Anders was not so much a language guy in my opinion but much more an assembly genius. And that resulted in the other 50% of why Turbo Pascal was so fast…

image
image1568×1072 391 KB

Via the HN discussion at

On this article
https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2023-november-turbopascal40.html

2 Likes
2

I have not used turbo pascal, but for the small model for the x86 is very compact and optimized
for the ALGOL style of compiler. With C and other languages you had to have code that works with every model.

3

Happy 40th TP! Still use it today and latest Delphi. I started with Turbo Pascal on a VIC20 with a CPM / 80 col / 16K expansion card that I bought with my paper route when I was 14. Miss those days…

1 Like
4

A comment from that thread (and its response):

Joel Armstrong once said “You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.”.

reminded me of a blog post I read recently on Text User Interfaces of 30 years ago (which included the TPs of the time):

1 Like
5

I suspect most IDE editors just did 64kb files. My favorite text editor was T.com with a 4Kb file size. As one who writes a few programs now and then I want just plain text editing on a 80x25 FULL SCREEN, but you lost that with modern OS’s, and annoying wide screen monitors.

6

I still set my “programming xterm” to 80 columns, but must admit I set the number of rows to the full length of the screen, usually giving me nearly 90 rows on my larger display.

(edited because I confused one of my rows with columns - le sigh, more caffeine before proof-reading).

1 Like