Comment by hnlmorg
4 years ago
Amusing article.
Turbo Pascal was an awesome IDE. I remember writing a lots of DOS software for it. Including a graphical shell (like early Windows).
4 years ago
Amusing article.
Turbo Pascal was an awesome IDE. I remember writing a lots of DOS software for it. Including a graphical shell (like early Windows).
Turbo Pascal taught me what is the minimum acceptable tooling for any programming language, good OOP programming foundations (Turbo Vision and OWL later on), systems programming doesn't need to be like the C mess, good compilation speed and modular programming.
All of that in PCs running MS-DOS in 1 MB RAM.
Thanks Borland.
Borlando Turbos included amazing docs accessible within the IDE, with useful code examples one could quickly copy+paste and try. Great time to learn, before msdn collection, or the web as we know it now.
With a DOS extender you could do a proper GUI shell and not worry about memory constraints if you had the memory.
I was still at high school though so my graphical shell was pretty limited. I’m still pretty impressed I pulled off what I did though. Just goes to show how easy Pascal was.
I have started building an IDE for Algorand smart contracts (TEAL/PyTEAL) inspired by Turbo Pascal. It will go up on TurboTEAL.com within a couple of months. A lot of the core such as the Python -> PyTeal transpiler is already working. It will have the same look, built in instant context sensitive help, and a few other things.