Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!crackers!m2c!umvlsi!dime!smectos!eli
From: eli@smectos.gang.umass.edu (Eli Brandt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Questions/Observations about TP v. 6.0
Summary: floating point in particular
Keywords: slug, dog, brain-dead
Message-ID: <25453@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 91 20:04:20 GMT
References: <1991Jan20.152128.21994@isis.cs.du.edu>
Sender: news@dime.cs.umass.edu
Reply-To: eli@smectos.CS.UMASS.EDU (Eli Brandt)
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Lines: 45

In article <1991Jan20.152128.21994@isis.cs.du.edu> ebergman@isis.UUCP (Eric Bergman-Terrell) writes:
>
>I just upgraded from Turbo Pascal 5.0 to 6.0 had have some questions:
>
>1.	Software Floating Point:  
>
>	It looks like they've made rather dramatic improvements with
>	software floating point.  My astronomy program, which relies
>	heavily on floating point, runs about 40% faster when software
>	floating point is used.  Has anyone noticed similar speedups?

This sounds like you're using {$E+}, IEEE floating point.  IMHO, this is a bad
idea: without a coprocessor, it's so damned slow (though yes, it is faster than
5.0, I got about 30%) that it's intolerable.  What I end up doing is distributing
two versions of every fp-intensive program: one '87-only and the other with
six-byte reals.  In 5.0, E+ was about one third the speed of E-, if I'm remembering
the right numbers.  I haven't looked at 6.0 output, but in 5.0, every time you
do an E+ fp instruction, it calls some INT 37h I believe, which then goes to
Borland fp code to convert your real to 10-bytes, multiply these mongo 10-byte reals,
convert them back, and return from the interrupt.  What's worse, even if the user
has an '87, it still goes through an interrupt for each instruction, which is 
some serious overhead...

[ second question deleted; I haven't learned TV yet ]

>3.	Turbo Pascal for Windows:
>
>	Turbo Pascal for Windows is supposed to be out in the first quarter
>	of this year.  Has anyone heard if Borland is going to make
>	Turbo Vision "talk to" Windows 3.0?  If I knew that Turbo Vision
>	applications could become Windows 3.0 applications by changing
>	a compilation option, I suppose that it would make the investment
>	in learning Turbo Vision worthwhile...

I would guess that that's why they put it in.  However, who knows?  If I write
a few 20 K-line programs in Turbo Vision and Borland pulls a Turbo Basic on it,
I'm going to be *annoyed*.  I couldn't care less about TP/Windows, but TP for
X might be interesting.

>Thanks in advance,
>
>
>Eric Bergman-Terrell

 Eli