Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!ucsd!ogicse!zephyr.ens.tek.com!vice!bobb
From: bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: MSP vs TP
Message-ID: <6189@vice.ICO.TEK.COM>
Date: 30 Oct 90 21:05:16 GMT
References: <PgiTR1w163w@infopls.UUCP>
Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or.
Lines: 65

In article <PgiTR1w163w@infopls.UUCP> awol@infopls.UUCP (Al Oomens) writes:
>Does anyone have any info (benchmarks?) on diferances between MicroSoft 
>Pascal versus Turbo Pascal? Execution speed, generated code size etc. Any 
>info or oppinions would be appreciated!
>                               Al

  Al:
  (The following refers to Microsoft Quick Pascal, 1.0)

  A satisfied Turbo Pascal user for several years, I attended a demon-
  stration of MS Pascal about a year and a half ago.  I was impressed
  enough with the user interface to purchase the product.  That turned
  out to be the last good impression I had of the language.  Some of 
  what I found:

  1.  The link buffer for MS Pascal is always the disk, so compile/link
  time to produce an executable suffers dramatically compared to Turbo
  (if you use memory linking with Turbo).

  2.  Generated code size was invariably larger, even with both compilers
  with full optimizations turned on.  I have no benchmarks, but I have
  created hundreds of thousands of lines of code in Pascal, and every
  program I converted to MS Pascal was larger.

  3.  Execution speed was invariably slower, *especially* disk access.
  Again, no benchmarks, but the difference was *extremely* noticeable.

  4.  MS Pascal won't compile an executable larger than about 200k.

  5.  The environment proved to be quirky, and I often got errors with
  little more than a number and a message to call the Microsoft Product
  hotline.  Not even so much as a probable cause could be gleaned from
  the display.

  6.  The only other good note:  The Microsoft graphics kernel is included
  with Quick Pascal.  This kernel has routines to handle automatic screen
  sizing and data scaling, releiving the programmer of some tedious
  programming.

  My advice:  Stick with Turbo, at least until Microsoft addresses some
  of these problems with a future release.  Borland has a much more
  polished product.


==================================================================
Bob Beauchaine

bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM   
 
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