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From: bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: MS Pascal vs. Turbo
Message-ID: <6302@vice.ICO.TEK.COM>
Date: 15 Nov 90 06:10:06 GMT
Distribution: comp.lang.pascal
Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or.
Lines: 47


  With Turbo 6.0 now a reality, I would like to take the time to
  present this unsolicited opinion of Turbo Pascal vs. Microsoft
  Pascal.  (A few posters seem to want to know...).

  Hit the 'n' key right now if you're not interested in a rather
  biased opinion.

  I am the proud? owner of both Turbo and MS Pascal.  I have made 
  a few discoveries over the last year or so about the relative
  merits of each.

  Microsoft Pascal touts complete Turbo pascal 5.0 compatibility.  
  This is blatantly not true.  (I am appalled that several magazine
  articles have missed this point.)  Admittedly, I have found only 
  one difference: overlays.  Turbo 5.0 has extensive overlay support
  to allow you to run programs larger than available memory.  Quick
  pascal 1.0 has no such support.  Worse, the index in the back of the 
  documentation mentions a page reference for the overlay unit several
  times.  The indexed reference is nowhere to be found.  

  As for the documentation itself, if you buy Quick Pascal, plan on 
  spending money for a Turbo 5.0 language reference unless you are
  the most novice of programmers.  The documentation is lacking in 
  most of the fine details of the language implementation.  True,
  this is the audience Microsoft was targeting.

  Execution speed?  Generally suffers compared to Turbo, especially
  in disk I/O intensive applications.

  Executable size?  My rough guess (from eyeballing files created 
  by both with comparable compiler directives) is that Turbo usually
  produces 10-20% smaller programs.  

  Compile time?  Forget it.  Turbo can compile and link your program
  5x in the time it takes Quick Pascal to do it once.

  Development environment?   Quick Pascal is the winner hands down, 
  though I understand that Turbo 6.0 now has the new environment, which
  I have been impressed with in Turbo C++ (I know, I'm a junkie.)


  Summary:  Unless your programs tend to consist of writeln('Hello, world');
  don't bother with Quick Pascal.  In the end, you'll be glad you didn't.

  Bob Beauchaine
  bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM