[HN Gopher] Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011) ___________________________________________________________________ Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011) Author : arkj Score : 24 points Date : 2022-03-11 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (prog21.dadgum.com) (TXT) w3m dump (prog21.dadgum.com) | hnlmorg wrote: | Amusing article. | | Turbo Pascal was an awesome IDE. I remember writing a lots of DOS | software for it. Including a graphical shell (like early | Windows). | lastdong wrote: | Borlando Turbos included amazing docs accessible within the | IDE, with useful code examples one could quickly copy+paste and | try. Great time to learn, before msdn collection, or the web as | we know it now. | mrlonglong wrote: | With a DOS extender you could do a proper GUI shell and not | worry about memory constraints if you had the memory. | hnlmorg wrote: | I was still at high school though so my graphical shell was | pretty limited. I'm still pretty impressed I pulled off what | I did though. Just goes to show how easy Pascal was. | dang wrote: | Related: | | _Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - April 2020 (170 | comments) | | _Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15104766 - Aug 2017 (15 | comments) | | _Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11733610 - May 2016 (2 | comments) | | _Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than (2011)_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4592997 - Sept 2012 (58 | comments) | | _Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - Oct 2011 (114 | comments) | miohtama wrote: | The real question, what these kind of articles do not ask, is | why Turbo Pascal was smaller? | | Hand written assembly was optimised, Pascal is easy to compile | language, but there are a lot of other things | | - Segmented 16 bit pointers - No graphics or images - Limited | OS - no glibc, could only save A: and C: drives - Computers | could not hibernate or sleep - Computers did not have periheral | devices or needed special software: printer, mouse - No network | - No multitasking - No portability | | For the editor itself | | - No autocomplete - No colours - Not very useful error messages | - VI like navigation experience (got much better in 5 years | with Turbo Vision IDE framework) | | Also | | - All documentation was in a dead tree format | | For the good reference point on sizes, the bible text is 4-5 | MB. | aidenn0 wrote: | We used Turbo C++ in my HS computer science class, but the AP | test was still in Pascal at the time. My dad had an old copy of | Turbo Pascal, so I used that to learn enough pascal to pass the | test. I was completely blown away by the compilation times. In | class, we fought over who got the 2 486 DX2s because you could | compile simple programs in under a minute on it. On my wimpy | AM386 at home Turbo Pascal compiled from scratch in seconds and | did incremental compiles instantaneously. | | A couple years later, I encountered common lisp for the first | time; it was even better because you could recompile single | functions. To this date, I still think very short iteration time | is a super-power for program design. | pkaye wrote: | In comparison, you can get TCC (tiny compiler) which is 100KB in | size and can produce 32/64 bit code, compile the Linux kernel and | probably better optimizations. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-11 23:01 UTC)