20 Feb
2015
20 Feb
'15
6:18 a.m.
On Fri, 20 Feb 2015, Tor Arntsen wrote:
On 19 February 2015 at 17:40, geneb <geneb at
deltasoft.com> wrote:
Fortunately, I've never been exposed to "as-designed" Pascal. I
suspect
the people that spend time denigrating Pascal have never been exposed to
Turbo Pascal. (...or they're simply idiots. :) )
I suspect it was Borland's extensions to
Pascal that removed any limitation
in I/O.
That's right. But there's more than I/O. The academic-tool variant
of Pascal, as Wirth designed it, was simply useless in practice, or
extremely cumbersome to use because you couldn't design a function
which could take arrays of variable sizes as input, you had to declare
one function for each size. Hopeless. You couldn't do any real data
processing that way. Turbo Pascal, and every other useful variant,
e.g. the Pascal I used on a minicomputer, fixed that part, and often
added I/O extensions in various ways. In short, they made the language
flexible, and thus usable.
Then TP of course had that fast edit-compile-execute
cycle, a low
price, and the super-easy IDE. The learning curve from getting your
hands on TP to actually use it was very low. Actually the Turbo Pascal
IDE is still the only IDE I like. I don't use any of the modern ones,
they are just in the way. But I recently tried the CP/M TP version
again, haven't used it since the eighties.. and I still like the IDE.
Re-learned it in seconds.
You might want to check out Lazarus. It's a pretty slick project. It's
basically the RAD equivalent to Delphi and uses FPC as the back-end
compiler.
The text-mode IDE for FPC is very simliar (if not identical) to the Turbo
Pascal 7.0 IDE. It's very nice.
g.
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