[HN Gopher] Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)
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Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)
Author : Tomte
Score : 158 points
Date : 2020-04-11 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prog21.dadgum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (prog21.dadgum.com)
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I learned TP during college and thought programming
| professionally would be simple like that... Ignorance is bliss
| right?
| [deleted]
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| The BBC computers had a pascal compiler that was about 5K if I
| remember. It lacked quite a lot though, like records I think,
| enumerations & more, but had nestable procs/funcs so wasn't too
| far off the language in other ways. Never used it BTW.
|
| One thing I liked about pascal but missed in every language since
| is the ability to have arrays start from arbitrary values. It can
| be fudged in C/C++ pretty easily but still, be nice to have it
| built into languages like java/scala/so many more.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Another nice feature is sets and ranges, so you can have
| something like type Day = (Monday, Tuesday,
| Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday);
| Days = set of Day; const Weekdays = [Monday..Friday];
| ... if Today in Weekdays then ... ...
|
| Sets are essentially bit flags but they look much better than a
| series of #define MONDAY 0x0001 #define TUESDAY 0x0002 etc.
| IMO, of course :-P.
| [deleted]
| wuwuno wrote:
| Wrote a program to manage the sale and rental of video tapes for
| an small business. I wrote it in 1984, using Turbo Pascal. The
| last time I checked the store was still running the same software
| in 2005.
|
| The application was table driven, all important configuration
| items were stored in a text file as a key-value pair. It had a
| bar-code scanner and was tied into a cash drawer. Receipts were
| printed on small dot matrix printer.
|
| It took about 4 weeks to write.
|
| The best programming environment ever.
| codr7 wrote:
| I had so much fun with Turbo Pascal in the early 90's, I used it
| to create everything from GUI frameworks to ANSI bulletin board
| systems and keyloggers. Definitely the most creative environment
| I've come across.
|
| Then came C++, and I wasted A LOT of time trying to wrap my head
| around it while creating nothing of value before giving it up
| entirely.
|
| My Pascal experience also landed me my first job after
| university, which was to help write/maintain a system developed
| in Delphi.
| greenyoda wrote:
| I've never used Turbo Pascal, but I've used UCSD Pascal, which
| was also pretty small. In a college computer graphics course in
| around 1980, we ran UCSD Pascal on Terak 8510/a machines, which
| had a total of 28K 16-bit words (56K bytes) of RAM.
|
| The Terak was an interesting machine:
|
| > _The Terak 8510 /a of 1976 or 1977 was among the first desktop
| personal computers with a bitmap graphics display. It was a
| desktop workstation with an LSI-11 compatible processor, a
| graphical framebuffer, and a text mode with downloadable fonts.
| Despite the lack of a MMU, it was capable of running a stripped
| version of UNIX version 6. It was the first personal machine on
| which the UCSD p-System was widely used.[1] Various universities
| in the USA used it in the late 1970s and early 1980s to teach
| Pascal programming. It provided immediate graphic feedback from
| simple programs encouraging students to learn._[1]
|
| Also, in those days, we were running Version 7 Unix on a PDP
| 11/45, which supported several concurrent users in what would now
| be an unimaginably tiny 256K of RAM.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terak_8510/a
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > And the whole thing was lightning fast, orders of magnitude
| faster at building projects than Microsoft's compilers.
|
| This particular comparison is interesting when you consider that
| the primary author of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, has been at
| Microsoft working on C# and TypeScript for quite a while.
| oaiey wrote:
| Anders (and Typescript and C# and TurboPascal) is always about
| productivity. Compile time is only a small part of that.
| userbinator wrote:
| It's even more interesting when you consider that it ran under
| MS-DOS, which had no dynamic linking --- it's a statically linked
| binary.
|
| _The touch command under OS X Lion (44,016 bytes)._
|
| ...and I bet that one is dynamically linked.
|
| I believe the reason why it's so fast is because it has no
| optimiser, and generates code as it parses. Pascal is also one of
| the easier languages to compile.
| ken wrote:
| Here is touch.c [1] from macOS. The only change since Lion is
| the addition of the __used attribute on a couple of consts at
| the beginning. It's very similar to the FreeBSD one, though
| they've diverged slightly in the past 2 decades.
|
| It supports 8 different flags (plus an undocumented -? flag),
| with support for using absolute or relative times, setting
| various timestamps on a file, and options for dealing with
| symlinks and permissions and such. More features than I'll ever
| need, but not outrageously so.
|
| On Mojave, this file is only 23392 bytes, so it's no longer
| bigger than Turbo Pascal. Plus, automatic filesystem
| compression shrinks this down to only 7340 bytes on disk. Since
| blocks are 4096 bytes, this is actually the second-smallest
| (non-empty) file!
|
| [1]:
| https://opensource.apple.com/source/file_cmds/file_cmds-287....
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Turbo Pascal programs relied on separate on-disk .BGI files
| that contained object code and effectively implemented a kind
| of dynamic linking (albeit in a single-task context). It was
| possible to directly link them into the final executable, but
| this wasn't the default.
| pcardoso wrote:
| Perhaps they were .TPUs instead of BGI? BGIs were the graphic
| drivers IIRC.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| TPUs are closer than BGIs, but still aren't dynamically
| linked. They are object files which are statically linked
| into the final exe.
|
| It's possible that the author is thinking of pre-TP4.0
| chain files (which were used to get around the 64K memory
| limit of .COM format before TP switched to generating
| EXEs.)
| FpUser wrote:
| It did have overlays that were relatives of dll
| api wrote:
| What is all the weight in that "touch" binary? It can't be
| code. My guess would be that the format is just not optimized
| for size and contains a bunch of boilerplate records whose
| minimum size is in the kilobytes.
| haberman wrote:
| I just ran Bloaty (https://github.com/google/bloaty) on
| /usr/bin/touch from Catalina, and I got this:
| $ bloaty `which touch` -d segments,sections --domain=file
| FILE SIZE --------------- 55.1% 19.6Ki
| __LINKEDIT 91.7% 18.0Ki Code Signature
| 2.7% 544 Symbol Table 1.9% 376 Lazy
| Binding Info 1.6% 328 String Table
| 1.2% 232 Indirect Symbol Table 0.6%
| 112 Binding Info 0.2% 32 Export Info
| 0.1% 24 Function Start Addresses 0.0%
| 8 Rebase Info 0.0% 8 Table of Non-
| instructions 0.0% 0 [__LINKEDIT]
| 22.2% 7.90Ki __TEXT 35.0% 2.77Ki
| __TEXT,__text 33.6% 2.65Ki [__TEXT]
| 17.2% 1.36Ki [Mach-O Headers] 4.2% 339
| __TEXT,__cstring 3.4% 274 __TEXT,__const
| 3.3% 266 __TEXT,__stub_helper 1.9% 150
| __TEXT,__stubs 1.5% 120
| __TEXT,__unwind_info 11.2% 4.00Ki __DATA
| 94.9% 3.80Ki [__DATA] 4.9% 200
| __DATA,__la_symbol_ptr 0.2% 8
| __DATA,__data 11.2% 4.00Ki __DATA_CONST
| 98.4% 3.94Ki [__DATA_CONST] 1.6% 64
| __DATA_CONST,__got 0.3% 104 [Mach-O Headers]
| 100.0% 35.6Ki TOTAL
|
| So 2.77Ki of actual code in "__TEXT,__text".
|
| Those [__TEXT], [__DATA], and [__DATA_CONST] sections are the
| part that is lost to padding, so 10.4Ki or so.
|
| Disclosure: I am the author of Bloaty.
| tomaszs wrote:
| I have written a 3D engine in Turbo Pascal. There was a castle
| you was able to walk through. It was fascinating because all
| calculation has to be done manually including figuring all the
| math to figure out where to plot a 3D point on a screen. Great
| times. Later i have moved to Visual Basic and OpenGL. Nice
| memories from primary school
| smitty1e wrote:
| Ah, Visceral BaySuck. I've been in places where all one had was
| MSOffice, and that VBA IDE was it.
|
| I keep a private github repo called NVBC (NecroVisualBasiCon)
| with snippets of the all the madness that was trying to trick
| VBA into being a useful tool. The IDE was good, but the
| language itself was surgically precise in delivering 83% of
| what one wanted for a given task.
| tomaszs wrote:
| It was caused mostly by the way MSOffice access was delivered
| to VBA at that time. And maybe also by VBA itself. Cannot
| remember. Anywho. VB standalone was pretty decent. Nice you
| have the library. Its part of the history
| pkaye wrote:
| I'd like to see a performance comparison between Turbo Pascal and
| TCC (tinycc) which is about 100k is size.
| icedchai wrote:
| I used Turbo Pascal back in high school (1992-93, AP computer
| science.) By that point, I already knew C and it felt like a step
| backwards in some respects. Still, the IDE was impressive and it
| was a lot of fun!
| fortran77 wrote:
| While today's code does a lot more, and has to deal with
| everything from internationalization to accessibility, I have to
| believe that we (I was around programming in those days!) were
| better at computer programming back when computers had memory
| measured in kilobytes than we are today.
|
| I still take on jobs to do embedded programming in assembly
| language on PIC or similar processors and my clients are usually
| amazed at what can be done in tiny amounts of code.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Limited resources are what drives creativity and art. I also
| think understanding of programming is better of persons who had
| this background
| dylan604 wrote:
| Severe limits/restrictions can influence some amazing
| solutions. To me, this separates the real programmers from the
| people that just get paid to bang out code. We went to the moon
| and back on this kind of severe limitations, yet today, we
| can't make a website without a library requiring 100s to 1000s
| of dependencies resulting in a total download larger than the
| amount of data required by the entire moon missions. That's
| just for one page of useless internet. I just shake my head at
| the silliness.
| philistine wrote:
| Not that I disagree with your point, but the computers used
| for the Apollo program needed a healthy amount of printed
| manuals and ground-based support to be functional. They were
| only a part of the computational stack required for Apollo.
| not_kurt_godel wrote:
| > We went to the moon and back on this kind of severe
| limitations
|
| Adjusting for inflation, NASA spent $283 billion going to the
| moon[0]. I can't be bothered to find a breakdown of how much
| of that budget could be directly tied to writing code, but I
| suspect that the investment was a wee bit higher than a rando
| frontend dev slapping together some libraries in 2020.
|
| [0] https://www.planetary.org/get-involved/be-a-space-
| advocate/b...
| throwanem wrote:
| Real programmers don't use Pascal.
| https://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers
| analog31 wrote:
| I think part of the fun in the "old days" was that you could
| familiarize yourself with your tool chain in its entirety. I
| mean, I knew every command in Turbo Pascal, and virtually every
| feature of the "operating system" such as it was. Even finding
| out information about algorithms was hard before the Internet,
| so I had to wring my own.
|
| The microprocessor wasn't radically different from the 4 bit
| computer that I built on breadboards for my college electronics
| class, and I could tell you pretty much all of the things it
| could do.
|
| Then the only limitation was you and your own wits.
|
| Today, not only is there a language to learn, but libraries,
| and a framework, and an architecture, and a "stack" and
| revision control system... you can't ever master the whole
| thing and it's changing faster than the baud rate of my
| eyeballs. It's still a boatload of fun, but a new kind of fun,
| and sometimes I like going back to the old kind.
| bdcravens wrote:
| My first "professional" language was ColdFusion. I literally
| took the manual that came with the install disks home and
| learned it all in about a week. (1999)
| oaiey wrote:
| We work on the shoulders of Giants nowadays.
| jonsen wrote:
| Yeah, it's a giant mess.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Yes, but did they have smart phones in that Eden?
| basementcat wrote:
| The phones made cool sounding tones when you pushed the
| buttons.
| analog31 wrote:
| They had buttons.
| geophile wrote:
| Turbo Pascal was an IDE and a blazingly fast compiler. In 1986, I
| ran it on my 64k IBM PC (8088 4MHz). It was like nothing else I
| had experienced previously. Prior to that, I had developed
| software in grad school on punch cards. I occasionally had access
| to a PDP-11. I don't remember what editor I used, but it
| certainly wasn't an IDE. It may have been line-oriented. At work,
| we had a VMS system, and I had access to a C compiler and my
| first emacs. Not too bad, but nothing as immediate and responsive
| as Turbo Pascal.
|
| Viewed another way, Turbo Pascal recaptured the incredibly rapid
| edit/run cycle that I first experienced with a PDP-8M running
| BASIC. Only now, I had 64k instead of my shared of 12k shared
| among a maximum of four users, an IDE instead of a line editor,
| and a far better language.
|
| Turbo Pascal also blew away anything else available on the PC. I
| had a C compiler from Microsoft that was far more expensive and
| far slower.
|
| Turbo Pascal was a truly magical piece of software. I remember
| that I had some initial skepticism about it. As I recall, it took
| some liberties with the language. But once I finally used it, I
| was instantly converted.
|
| IMHO, nothing has quite captured that experience of development
| until IntelliJ, starting with 4.x or 5.x.
| petilon wrote:
| > _Turbo Pascal was an IDE_
|
| Pretty sure it was the world's _first_ IDE, not just _an_ IDE.
| In a single .exe file it had a WordStar compatible text editor,
| compiler, linker and libraries.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| AFAIK the first "IDE" was the one in the original BASIC, or
| at least the first one to called that. It was command-line
| based (no fancy GUIs back then) but it allowed editing,
| debugging and compiling (despite BASIC dialects being
| commonly interpreted, the original BASIC was a compiler) from
| the same environment.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Possibly the environment described in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos might
| be the first.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Pretty sure it was the world's first IDE, not just an IDE.
|
| That probably depends on whether you count live-coding
| environments like Smalltalk had as "IDEs"
| petilon wrote:
| Hmm... you may be right. Here's the Smalltalk environment
| from 1980, it is pretty impressive:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not only Smalltalk, check Interlisp-D, Mesa XDE and
| Mesa/Cedar.
|
| Xerox PARC workstations were the first IDEs, alongside
| Lisp Machines from Genera and TI.
| corysama wrote:
| The same author has a separate article on some features of
| Turbo Pascal that made it so fast.
|
| https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html
| fortran77 wrote:
| The least the IBM PC every shipped with was 128kB; that was the
| smallest option IBM had shown in their catalog. That was for
| the cassette version.
|
| Are you sure you didn't have 640kB?
| dangoor wrote:
| Wikipedia says that the first IBM PC debuted in 1981 with 16k
| of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
| jecel wrote:
| I doubt anybody ever bought a 16KB tape-only IBM 5150 to
| hook up to their TV, but it was indeed the entry level
| configuration. It probably just existed to make the
| machine's price look good - even today all articles quote
| that configuration's price of US$1,565 (equivalent to
| $4,401 in 2019) instead of the $3K or more a practical PC
| would cost.
|
| The PC could only be expanded to 64KB on the motherboard.
| Anything beyond that required expansion cards, each adding
| at most 64KB initially (which opened the door for larger
| third party upgrades from AST and others). With only six
| slots and separate cards for the floppy disk controller,
| video, serial and parallel ports the largest practical
| configuration was initially only 192KB. Not that the
| software could take advantage of all that (in the case of
| .com stuff quickly ported from CP/M, things improved with
| .exe).
|
| When most people try to remember the original IBM PC they
| normally think of the 1983 PC XT (IBM 5160) instead which
| had more slots and more memory.
|
| Around 1989 I was asked to fix a Basic program that tested
| car shock absorbers. It took me less time to write a new
| version in Turbo Pascal than it would have taken for me to
| completely read the source of the original program. The IDE
| made a huge difference but the speed was also important
| since it allowed me to modify and try several times per
| minute.
| pinewurst wrote:
| I bought one of those - added the other 48k + a 192k
| multifunction card - way cheaper. Even sold it on at a
| profit a year or so later.
| analognoise wrote:
| Lazarus/FreePascal?
|
| There's a dedicated group of troopers who have kept the flame
| alive. It's cross platform. There's an Android port in
| progress. There's a JavaScript backend. The IDE is like all the
| good things about Delphi 7, none of the drawbacks.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Yes! I use it and really enjoy it so far. There are obviously
| some people using it for _very_ advanced work in medicine and
| the sciences, to see some of the community posts and shared
| libraries... Personally I think I'm building yet another text
| editor (starting with a text viewer) but the experience has
| been great.
|
| The community is really a nice bonus, too.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| I don't. Whoever thought recompiling Lazarus whenever you
| need to simply add another component to its pallet really
| lost the spirit of Pascal/Delphi on that one.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Interesting. I haven't needed to do so, but I thought I
| had heard that was a pretty quick recompile, on the order
| of < 10 seconds? I know there are some tips to speed it
| up.
|
| Here's the wiki page on component authoring:
|
| https://wiki.freepascal.org/How_To_Write_Lazarus_Componen
| t
| brnt wrote:
| Where does that community hang out? I find it very
| difficult to find Pascal projects on Github for instance.
| FpUser wrote:
| All you have to do is enter delphi in search box of
| github and you get whole pile of projects. Alternatively
| you can enter pascal instead of delphi. this agail will
| get you pile of projects albeit smaller. If that is
| difficult I am not sure what easy is.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Last week I saw that kind of content on freshcode.club as
| well as at least one of the Facebook groups.
| EdgarVerona wrote:
| I really enjoyed Turbo Pascal - the IDE, the included
| libraries, the Pascal language itself. It really felt like the
| python of its time.
| wslh wrote:
| Better than Python because it included an IDE and debugger
| while Python official installation included IDLE...
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Counterpoint: what are some things that Turbo Pascal lacked that
| we take for granted in a modern language environment?
| mhd wrote:
| What version of TP? The linked articles is about TP3, which
| lacks common prog lang features that later versions definitely
| had (like proper modules or objects).
|
| If you take a look at later versions or even early Delphi, I'd
| say garbage collection. Other languages from the Wirthian
| family had it, like Modula-2/3 or Oberon.
|
| Lambdas/first class functions.
|
| Unicode support.
|
| Syntactic sugar up the wazoo.
|
| Other than that, I think one could be very productive in a TP
| 5.5-ish language even today. The rest would be mostly about the
| infrastructure and community, like IDEs, package management and
| Medium posts with lots of memes.
| pjc50 wrote:
| No intellisense or similar. No extensibility or scripting.
| 80x25 text mode.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| VGA-class cards could display a 80x50 text mode. Not sure
| that it was easily accessible in MS-DOS without assembly
| hacks, but it could be configured from within Windows.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > VGA-class cards could display a 80x50 text mode. Not sure
| that it was easily accessible in MS-DOS without assembly
| hacks.
|
| It was directly accessible from the DOS prompt with the
| MODE command.
|
| Don't remember if TP had a library function that exposed
| it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, there were some hacky things you could do, e.g. using
| software from Quarterdeck? Don't remember. I'd have to go
| back and look at docs I wrote from a program I wrote t the
| time. I seem to remember supporting some alternative screen
| resolutions in a an MS-DOS directory manager I sold.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I have always used this mode when running TP, without any
| difficulties. I think it was enabled by a simple key when
| launching .exe, but I don't remember exactly, which means
| it was something simple and inconsequential.
| [deleted]
| jandrese wrote:
| Internationalization. Turbo Pascal was stuck with CP437 IIRC.
| dmitriid wrote:
| IDEs:
|
| - Intellisense
|
| - project-wide refactoring
|
| - lookup into external code (IntelliJ idea can even decompile
| .jars)
|
| - multi-language projects
|
| - debugging (including stepping into external and decompiled
| libs) with watch values of nearly unlimited complexity
|
| Language:
|
| - lambdas/anonymous functions
|
| - type inference
|
| - extension methods
| StreamBright wrote:
| I would say having an installer that depends on 3 other
| languages, using a particular libc without the ability to
| switch it up, unable to cross-compile to other platforms.
| esnible3 wrote:
| Turbo Pascal is 3.7x smaller than the Wikipedia page describing
| it. Wikipedia's prose description of Turbo Pascal is 148k.
| zengargoyle wrote:
| Oh wow, I think I learned Pascal via Turbo Pascal. When I was 14
| in 1984 I went to a Computer Camp at Virginia Tech and we used
| Pascal in this monolithic IDE sort of thing. Maybe it was
| actually UCSD Pascal.... We made a simple 16 room 4x4 dungeon
| with keys and doors. Each group writing the code for one room and
| them tying them all together. It came out not bad for a bunch of
| kids.
|
| When I got my Amiga a year later I was happy that there was a
| Pascal compiler, then saddened that it only had stdio sort of
| interface. No way to open windows and draw things or the like.
| Luckily I found a FORTH that not only had a 68k assembler but
| also all of the constants and things you needed to write graphics
| and the bonus of making that single executable file.
|
| Sorta sad I never really got to use Pascal after that. By
| university time it was all Assembly, FORTRAN and C for the CS
| classes.
| sbussard wrote:
| node_modules
| bdcravens wrote:
| Turbo Pascal is a language I've never used professionally but
| always has a special place in my heart. I grew up poor without
| any kind of a computer but always considered computers "fun". As
| a high school senior (1995) I took what I thought was just
| another computer class; they were teaching Turbo Pascal, and I
| immediately knew I discovered my life's passion.
| dakna wrote:
| I still have 2 post-it notes on my second monitor from when I
| decided to finally deep dive into the Android Framework.
|
| One says "1988 Pascal", the other one "2018 Kotlin". I wrote
| those after noticing how similar the syntax is for variable
| declaration and it felt like going back to my roots.
|
| The sheer joy of knowing your IDE, the language and the target
| platform all in one interface reminds me a lot of the days
| staring at the blue screen of Borland Turbo Pascal in the early
| 90s. I really missed it in all those years of web development I
| did afterwards.
| jasonv wrote:
| I remember coding in Turbo Pascal to hack on PCBoard and its
| fork, WWIV, which were BBS programs.
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(page generated 2020-04-11 23:00 UTC)