19 Feb
2015
19 Feb
'15
11:33 a.m.
On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, John Foust wrote:
At 05:05 PM 2/18/2015, Ethan Dicks wrote:
It was fast, easy to use, and inexpensive.
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
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? 
19 Feb
19 Feb
11:43 a.m.
On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, Mike Loewen wrote:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, John Foust wrote:
It also did a pretty good job of wiping the floor with every other
compiler out there, regardless of language.
g.
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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? 
11:51 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? 
1:04 p.m.
On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, Warner Losh wrote:
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.
At the West Coast Computer Faire, when Turbo Pascal was released,
Phillipe was deluged by continuous questions of "What about C?".
Phillipe repeated over and over and over, "NO, THIS is Pascal."
He got asked so many times, that by lunchtime, he changed his
answer to, "C will be coming soon; we are working on it."
Does anybody remember who originally wrote Turbo Pascal?
Were they involved, at all, in Turbo C?
By the millenium, [an early version?] Turbo C was available
for free download, so most of my students were using it.
I forced my students to do at least one assignment using a command
line compiler (GCC and/or DeSmet "Personal C" recommended)
even if they wanted to do everything else in IDE.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
3:16 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 11:04 AM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Does anybody remember who originally wrote Turbo
Pascal?
Anders Hejlsberg
Were they involved, at all, in Turbo C?
Not in the initial development of the Turbo C compiler, which was by
Bob Jervis. Possibly later.
12:49 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Mike Loewen
<mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> wrote:
It was certainly a lot cheaper than a C compiler. I paid real money
for Lattice/SAS C for the Amiga in the 1980s.
-ethan
All true, but
doesn't it make you wonder why Turbo Pascal
was such a popular development environment for the PC for so long?>
It was fast, easy to use, and inexpensive.
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