19 Feb
2015
19 Feb
'15
8:51 a.m.
On Feb 19, 2015, at 9:33 AM, Mike Loewen <mloewen
at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> wrote:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, John Foust wrote:
It didn?t completely suck in an era where most other alternatives did.
There were no C compilers worth a damn, and those that were available
were too slow or too limited.
It provided unformatted I/O extensions.
It provided access to the raw machine in lots of interesting ways.
It had common libraries for the common low-level accesses that you?d
want.
It was mostly ?C?ish enough that you could get s*t done quickly and efficiently.
There was some really bizarre stuff, but I wrote a lot of pascal utilities for
my DEC Rainbow back in the day that were impossible with the other tools
available at the time.
Then Turbo C and Turbo C++ came out and did all this plus compiled all
the unix code floating around and I dropped Turbo Pascal like a hot potato.
Warner
At 05:05 PM 2/18/2015, Ethan Dicks wrote:
It was fast, easy to use, and inexpensive. I snark about Pascal all the time. I encountered
it in a professional
capacity in 1987. [...]
Utterly trivial in languages that trust the programmer to handle
unformatted I/O.
All true, but doesn't it make you wonder why Turbo Pascal
was such a popular development environment for the PC for so long?>
Was it the sheer will power and marketing of Borland, or was
it the volume of developers who didn't need intensive low-level I/O?