Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!kth!draken!d88-eli
From: d88-eli@nada.kth.se (Erik Liljencrantz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Standard Pascal
Keywords: Pascal Turbo Borland Lightspeed Think
Message-ID: <1234@draken.nada.kth.se>
Date: 2 Jul 89 09:10:25 GMT
Reply-To: d88-eli@nada.kth.se (Erik Liljencrantz)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 32

In reply to previous messages:

I write to different types of programs (and I believe they have to be regarded
as two different forms of programming):

1. Professional application development: Speed and features are the major
     considerations. The ability to link in assembly language and create
     graphics is very important and portability is of less importance.

2. Intersystem programming: For example developing a program to calculate
     the mandelbrot set on your PC and then transfer it to a numbercrunching
     (Cray, if I had one, but a Pyramid will do...) computer when it works.

My experience lies with PC's, Mac's and Pyramid, Turbo, Lightspeed and BSD
Pascal. It isn't easy to run the very same program on these machines, and
especially file handling is difficult. Turbo uses Assign(FileVar,Name); 
Reset (FileVar); or Rewrite(FileVar); while Lightspeed & BSD uses
Reset(FileVar,Name); or Rewrite(Filevar,Name);. In BSD there is no Close
and some other differences. The Get/Put vs. Read/Write discussion: I deal
mostly with textfiles and they work the same (Read/Write).

What I like:
  Turbo Pascal (& Borland)
  Macintosh Toolboxes (It's documented as Pascal calls! What if the PC had 
                       such an environment...)

Sure I would like a standard, but I wouldn't settle with less performance in
my applications just because some of my programs should be able to run on
other systems.

                          -- Erik Liljencrantz --
                         -- d88-eli@nada.kth.se --