Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!caip!rutgers!husc6!seismo!elsie!imsvax!ted From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) Newsgroups: net.micro.pc Subject: The case for Borland's Turbo Pascal Message-ID: <631@imsvax.UUCP> Date: Mon, 20-Oct-86 21:29:42 EDT Article-I.D.: imsvax.631 Posted: Mon Oct 20 21:29:42 1986 Date-Received: Wed, 22-Oct-86 01:17:49 EDT Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD Lines: 130 All things being equal, i.e. in a world without Philippe Kahn or Borland, I would rather program in C than in Pascal. However, in the DOS world, all things are nowhere close to being equal. Borland's Turbo Pascal should probably be the "standard" programming language for 80 percent of the programming which gets done (outside of professional software houses such as Ashton- Tate) on today's XTs and ATs etc. A catalogue of justifications for this statement will seem long-winded, but here goes: 1. Price: at a retail price of around $70 and a street price of around $55, Turbo is nearly free. Reasonable DOS C compilers go for around $300 and the only reasonable C INTERPRETER goes for around $450. Keep this point in mind; compilers and interpreters both have their place in the scheme of things and Turbo functions as both. Few if any other packages make this claim. 2. Turbo, both in its interpreter (actually, compile to memory) and its compile (to .com) modes, produces very fast code. Further, the compiler itself is almost supernaturally fast, typical 2000 line programs compiling in 15 seconds on 6mh ATs. A CCI Power-6 (rated 10 times VAX 780 compute power) cannot match this with one user on the system. This is like having your cake and eating it; my understanding is that Turbo generates something closely akin to the old UCSD P code as lines are keyed in and runs from there when the compile directive is given. Most DOS C compilers, by the way, will take several minutes to compile a 2000 line program, even on an AT. Such differences in compiler speed will translate into a programmer getting 10 shots at solving a problem in an hour, versus two. 3. Turbo has the only completely believable debugging system in the Micro world. All other debugging systems amongst micros, to my knowledge, involve breakpoints and single stepping. In real life, blowups in real-world programs usually occur on the 876'th pass of some 200 line logical loop; who in hell wants to single step through all of that? The ONLY thing I ever want to know when a program blows up is the line number on which it blew; Turbo not only tells me that, it puts me right on that line in its editor. 4. Turbo is a cleanly and elegantly structured language; it is relatively easy to write large and logically complex programs and have the logic of them be visible to the programmer maintaining the software. This is the point on which Basic fails outright. 5. Turbo is a large super-set of standard Pascal, with a tremendously good interface into DOS and PC functionality, things which lie outside of any of the ANSI standards for programming languages. It is actually better than Basic in this regard. It actually allows machine-coded routines to be imbedded right into Turbo routines (Turbo inline code), allows DOS calls with the use of only one simple register structure, and has easy systems for addressing segments and offsets of Turbo variables, labels etc. Such code can be made as fast as is possible on 80x86 devices. Masm interfaces for the various C compilers are not as clean or elegant. 6. Turbo has several good systems for dealing with graphics applications, including the "turtle" system. These capabilities go beyond those of Basic or other programming languages available for DOS machines. 7. Turbo is heavily supported by after-market and free-ware packages and applications. Typical bulletin boards in the DC area will have 20 C-related files on hand, 45 Basic files, and 200 Turbo files. C programmers end up spending an extra $100 or $200 for a new function library every time they turn around. For Turbo, an unbelieveable number of such items are lying around free. Things of this nature which are lying about on the various D.C. area BBS's and from the PC SIG (and which are, hence, free) include: a. A sprite editor and very clean and elegant system for producing animation and cartoon effects using Turbo. b. An assembler which generates accurate Turbo inline code. This is a biggie and could be used to do nearly anything which could ever be done on a PC. c. A good screen font creation and editing system for Turbo. d. A system for handling Dbase3 files. e. A system for handling Lotus (wks) files. f. A good asynchronous line handling routine for use in writing communications packages. g. Several very good general purpose window and menuing packages etc., including one, the "Boosters" library, which is comparable to the best C library I've seen. h. A fast-fourrier transform system. i. A system for writing memory-resident programs in Turbo. j. A system for executing other programs from within a Turbo program. A user willing to spend a little money judiciously has some even more interesting options, most notably the TurboPower TP compiler which compiles to .exe files and can generate large- model (640K) code and do linking. This one goes for about $70. The TurboPower system answers the only semi-major problem most users would have regarding Turbo, i.e. "What do you do when you need to write really big programs?". The other thing which bothers some people regarding Turbo is the fact that it isn't totally "standard". This is the one case I know of in which the Ansi standard is really kind of a joke. With 500,000 users, Turbo IS the real standard for Pascal in the Micro World, pure and simple.