Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!maytag!watstat!dmurdoch
From: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Upgrade to TP 5.5
Message-ID: <1420@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Date: 2 Feb 90 13:50:56 GMT
References: <22298@adm.BRL.MIL>
Sender: daemon@maytag.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 27

In article <22298@adm.BRL.MIL> A1.RJS@isumvs.iastate.edu (Ricardo Salvador) writes:
>Gavin C. H. Zau asks for reasons to upgrade from Turbo Pascal
>version 4 to version 5.5:
>
>The main innnovation in 5.5 is the addition of object-oriented
>programming (OOP) features.  

That's the main difference between 5.5 and 5, but I'd say a more significant
difference between 5.5 and 4 is the integrated debugger that version 5 
introduced.  It alone is worth the upgrade price; if you also buy the
"Professional" version, you get an external debugger which is even better
(especially on a 386).

They also added a floating point emulation library with 5, so that you can
write programs that use the IEEE types with or without a numeric coprocessor.

Other minor differences between 5.5 and 5:
 - improved overlay support.  I've never used it, so I don't know if it
   really is significantly better.

 - eradication of a long-standing bug in floating point code generation.
   If e is declared extended, then you'll get an error trying to execute
      e:=e+e+e+e+e+e+e+e+e+e+e+e;
   in versions 4 and 5, but not in 5.5.  Similarly for any expression 
   involving a long string of operations on extendeds.

Duncan Murdoch