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From: d88-cbr@dront.nada.kth.se (Christian Beijner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal & PopUp Menus
Message-ID: <1990Nov10.134533.11060@nada.kth.se>
Date: 10 Nov 90 13:45:33 GMT
References: <414@ub.d.umn.edu> <1363@radius.com> <13685@june.cs.washington.edu>
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 78

In article <13685@june.cs.washington.edu> chou@june.cs.washington.edu (Pai Chou) writes:
>That's funny, I have just the opposite experience.  I started with
>Turbo, but everybody told me how wonderful THINK Pascal was, so I
>bought it.  I hardly used it.  I prefer the Turbo setup: one single
>compiler and no other baggage files (units) messing up my directory.
>Its size is also amazingly small.  I find myself getting a lot more
>work done with Turbo than with THINK.  Well, it's just my personal
>experience.  Am I the only one that prefers Turbo over THINK?
>
>Pai Chou
>chou@june.cs.washington.edu

I also prefer Turbo, this is due to several reasons.

1) The projects in Think. Every time you compile something in
    Think it creates a project file which is larger than the resulting
    application would be.
   Just by considering the number of "small" Pascal programs I have
   I can figure out that If I had made them all in Think, I would
   have had Think project on my HD and nothing else.
  
   Also anyone creating and above all changing the appearance of
   the order of files in Think projects know this can be a complete
   pain. (I have Think experience from using it on the work)
   
2) Speed.
   Compiling Turbo programs are a real joy compared to Think.
   According to Thinks ads etc., both programs should compile
   at the same speed, but they didnt mention the link times
   which easily exceed the compile time on Think.

3) Formatting.
   I mean really, why should programmers be hit over their fingers
   for wanting to format programs their own way.
   Think automatically formats my text its way. (There are
        options on this, but they are few and there is no "shut off")
   My Turbo programs become shorter and more easily read.

4) Pascal interpreting:
      When choosing pascal Think lacked such Pascal features as.
      1) Intervals in case. You had to write 1,2,3,4,5,6 etc.
       (They have it now)
      2) Otherwise. You simply have to have it when programming
         in Think.
      3) Standard operations on all types.
             You cant write:
             $00FF and $FF00
             'Hello '+'there'
             #13                  (This is chr(13))

5) Pros of Think
   1) The debugger.
      

6) Cons of Turbo
    1) Cant handle arrowkeys (this IS a big minus)
    2) Will not be updated.
          
7) Cons of both:

When I started programming I used PolyPascal (made by the original
   programmer of Turbo Pascal, a dane)
There was something called "Typed constants"
You wrote something like this:
CONST  prompt:string(.20.)='Please do this and this';

This created a reseved space in the CODE segment where this constant
existed. The advantage was that the constant was initialized, existed
during runtime, and COULD be modified as a variable. (Not quite a constant)

Why have none of the Pascal implementers included this beautiful feature.
(For any programmer not seeing the usefulness of this, take a look of
  the initializing part of one of your programs, how many variables
   you initialize to the same value with normal constants or time-consuming
   resource-leading)

Sorry bout the long letter but I cannot understand how Think got this big.
/Chris