Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!PEDEV!rogerson
From: rogerson@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dale Rogerson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: experience with tp5.5?
Keywords: tp5.5
Message-ID: <2585@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Date: 14 Jul 89 13:10:48 GMT
References: <799@eutrc3.urc.tue.nl>
Reply-To: rogerson@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dale Rogerson)
Organization: NCR Corp., Engineering & Manufacturing - Columbia, SC
Lines: 51

In article <799@eutrc3.urc.tue.nl> wsinrb@eutrc3.urc.tue.nl (r.bieling) writes:
>
>Does any-one have any experience with turbo pascal 5.5 yet?
I just got it Weds, so I am just starting to play with it.

>I'm curious whether it is worth the upgrade or not. So far
I got it in order to play with the OOPS features which are derived from
C++ and Apple's Object Pascal.  For playing with OOPs it is probably worth
the upgrade money.

>I didn't find too much about it in any magazine, any reviews
>available?
I believe that Byte magazine, The Programmer's Journal, and Computer
Language (maybe even Dr. Dobb's) all have articles on the new release.
However, the ones I read only mentioned the new OOPs features.

>Beside introduction of object oriented mechanisms,
>are there any more changes, new calls, or bug repairs?
Bugs Fixes? Turbo Products do not have any bugs to fix :-).  This is at
least the mentality of most software houses.  I am sure they fixed some of
the previous bugs.  I do not know what those bugs were, and they are not
about to tell me.

Other changes include:
- The case statement selector can now be any byte-sized or word-sized ordinal
  type such as type Word.

- Overlays have been greatly improved with many additional procedures and
  functions.  I have not used overlays since the old days so I do not
  really know how this differs from 5.0.

- An online tutorial to introduce the programming environment.  (This thing
  is a BIG joke.  It is basically a bunch of screens saved in a file. and
  the tour program spits them back at you.  It pretends that you are running
  the environment but you are not.  Best line - "The program has already 
  compiled and run."  Yea, right.

>By the way, does any-one know which other machines will or do
>run turbo pascal, and how compatibility is guarantied if so?

It is suppose to run on any almost MSDOS clone.  That is, the command line
version of the compiler should run on any computer that runs MSDOS.

Anyone also playing with this?


>Thanks in advance.
Bitte, Bitte.

-----Dale
	Rogerson-----