Talk:Turbo Pascal

message: Has there ever been a time when computers didn't have limited computing resources?  Should probably be re-worded.  It's a bit like saying "Back in the 80's, when cars had round tires, ...."  cbmeeks 14:16, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, you have a point.  They weren't limited compared to the other PCs of the day.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 16:29, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

text: The 8080 and Z80 were much more limited than the 8088 and 8086.  I've looked at how to fix that paragraph, but I didn't see what to do.  I think it might be best to eliminate that paragraph - it doesn't tie directly into Turbo Pascal.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 23:38, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: "At the time 8080/Z80/8088/8086 machines had limited computing resources"

message: I don't think this phrase is quite accurate.  At least here in the UK they sold Turbo Pascal (in red box) for one price, and Borland Pascal (in a blue box) for a considerably higher price.  I think the difference is that the latter had lots more libraries and other features (it was intended to be the "professional" product).  I've not updated the article, as I'm not sure enough about the details to make a worthwhile addition. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 11:59, 26 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "Turbo Pascal, also known as Borland Pascal"

message: Please discuss the reasons why you want to make a page move before doing so. This article was originally conceived as an article on Turbo Pascal. If you want to discuss its later differentiation into personal (Turbo) and enterprise (Borland) editions and the final amalgamation of those editions under the single name Borland Pascal, that's excellent but note that the rebranding of Turbo Pascal as Borland Pascal took place some time after the introduction of the product. It certainly was not known as Borland Pascal for the first few years of its life and that is why the most appropriate title for this article is Turbo Pascal, the name with which it was associated in the public mind throughout its product life. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 04:10, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
: That's not exactly correct differentiation. The package was sold on the streets under Turbo Pascal 7.0 name was a compiler (and IDE) which targeted DOS 16bit real-mode. Borland Pascal 7.0 street name has a considerably different meaning - it was a cross-platform (well, as cross-platform as Borland can) compiler (and IDE) targeting DOS 16bit real-mode, DOS 16bit protected-mode and Windows 16bit protected-mode, and it has real-mode compiler sold under Turbo Pascal name included in the package. That is, TP7 is a subset of BP7. Windows 16bit compiler which was sold under Turbo Pascal for Windows name was also included within BP7 package. What made BP7 special was multi-target compiler and IDE (which ran under DOS in protected-mode) not sold separately. -- (Wrote someone who didn't sign their comment with ~~~~)
::No. It was sold as Turbo Pascal 1.0. Turbo Pascal 7.0 and Borland Pascal 7.0 came way later. -- Derek Ross | Talk 20:13, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Page move

message: I removed this comment:
:The IBM PC game The Bards Tale was written in Pascal. 
from the article, becase:
# I've never heard it before
# It was out of place—it was in a paragraph by itself with no context
# It doesn't specify that it was written in Turbo Pascal, what this article is about
# It wasn't even wikilinked correctly (not a big deal, but there are several articles on The Bard's Tale).
To include the factoid in the article, I'm going to insist on a reference.  If it was just written in Pascal, the factoid should go in the Pascal article.  And lastly, if it was written with Turbo Pascal mention it and try to give it some context—like a bullet in a Trivia section.
I know Wizardry was written in Pascal, but I never heard that the MS-DOS version of The Bard's Tale was. — Frecklefoot | Talk 14:29, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)
The MS-DOS versions of Bard's tale and its sequel contain 1986 Microsoft C copyright messages. 2fort5r (talk) 05:29, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: ''Bard's Tale''

message: I still have a copy of the original Nascom cassette based compiler and I have used the Compass compiler for CP/M. I can assure everyone that the user interface design of the IDE was basically the same for them as for Turbo Pascal proper. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 17:59, 10 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: IDE

message: It is a know fact that Turbo Pascal has a bug in the delay system call that causes programs compiled with it to crash in fast computers, and that a patch is available. However, I can't see any reference to it in the article. Somebody more knowledgeable than me should write it. --Pezezin 15:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: iirc it has something to do with the crt unit but i'm not entirely sure what. Plugwash 17:57, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

text: It was a bug in initialization section of Crt unit. This initialization was needed  to make Delay procedure work properly -- you have to measure CPU speed for this. There are various ways to correct this. I used crtfix program. It allows you to patch already compiled exe programs (i.e. you don't have to recompile them from sources, which is handy when you don't have the sources :) ), it also allows you to patch your Crt unit so that future compiled programs are OK. And it comes with sources, freeware.  Oh, and the readme for crtfix describes what's the cause of this bug in much greater detail. You can download crtfix e.g. from here. MichalisKamburelis 08:22, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Various solutions are also discussed in http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/pas-r200.htm. 94.30.84.71 (talk) 20:06, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timer bug 

message: Articles reads like one could use builtin assembler in Turbo Pascal since v.1.0
At least one could use integrated debugger to trace assembler parts of PAscal program.
1) AFAIR asm keyword introduced in TP7. At least TP 3.0 and 5.5 coud not use buiilt-in assebler. You had to use hex-coded x86 binary opcodes (Inline keyword) or link separately assembled .OBJ files. But then You could not debug then line-by-line.
2) Integrated debugger since beginning ? Did it appeared in TP4 ?
:asm keyword introduced in TP7
:IIRC so-called "BASM", the integrated assembler, came in with version 6.0 (1990). Before that, and at least it was there in version 3.0 (not sure about 2.0 or 1.0), there was the so-called "inline assembler", which was not a real assembler (since it did not understand mnemonics like MOV or CALL) but permitted insertion of any opcode bytes inside the code stream, and had a basic scheme to link with variable and similar symbols. It persisted until Delphi 1.0, and was not kept in the 32-bit rewrite of the compiler.
:link separately assembled .OBJ files. But then You could not debug then line-by-line.
:.OBJ linking of OMF files (traditional Intel-based format) was introduced in version 4.0; the debug informations (Borland dialect) inside the .OBJ file carried toward the debugger was possible with version 5.0.
:Version 3.0 (and perhaps before) just permitted the linking in of raw chunk of bytes, so-called .BIN (graphics was added to Turbo 3.0 with this very hack.)
:Integrated debugger
:"Integrated debugging" is really a feature of the IDE: since it allows (from day 1) to run the compiled program from within Turbo, the first environment gaved some kind of support here. Then with TP4 came the windowed environment, much improved with TP5 (along with the standalone TurboDebugger which alleviates the memory constraints.)
:
:Article could be rewritten to drop the bad impression you're felling, but there is no definitive milestone which can be marked as "introduction of assembler" or "debugger"; features were improved over versions. -- AntoineL 15:27, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  usuing built-in assembler ? 

message: What's up with the version 1.0 section?  It goes on to talk about inline assembler, the profiler -- the reader not already familiar with Turbo Pascal would think that all of this was available in 1983 with version 1.0!  This needs to be fixed. Trixter 15:48, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "version 1.0" section covers ALL versions 

message: Turbo Pascal compiled and ran entirely in memory. In contrast, MS Pascal needed at least a Compiler Disk, a linker disk, and a source disk. Running on a single disk machine, the operator needed to load the compiler disk, load the source disk, write to the object disk, load the compiler disk again, write to the object disk, load the linker disk, write to the target disk. And you typically finished by reloading the DOS disk. Even on a two disk machine, the three pass compiler required disk swapping of the compiler and linker disks. The massive productivity improvement of Turbo Pascal 2 and 3 came firstly from the elimiation of disk swapping. 
A limitation was that Turbo Pascal would stop at the first compilation error. Without a seperate listing file (and disk), and with only a single pass compiler, Turbo Pascal was unable to understand and report multiple errors.
The difference favoured TP. Although the MS product was flexible and powerful, TP, which didn't wait till the end of the file to report an error, was part of the trend from 'computer centre' computing to cheap fast interactive personal computing.
Well the better optimizing compiler of the time was Pascal MT+ by Digital Research, not the Microsoft product. We pros used MT+ for the final compile and Turbo for the quick development. That's how it was.
: Having used a Pascal compiler that didn't stop on encountering an error, I have memories of generating many, many (printed!) pages of compiler errors that boiled down to 'you missed a semi-colon at the end of the first line and I got very confused after that'. I greatly appreciated TP's approach (and compilation speed). MT+ wasn't entirely compatible with TP (or given that MT+ came first, perhaps that should be the other way around) and was vastly slower in terms of compilation speed and, on CP/M-80, execution speed not least because that targetted the 8080 CPU rather than the Z-80 that TP insisted upon. Lovingboth (talk) 16:04, 13 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turbo 

message: Community, it is a bit absurd to have a Turbo pascal page that doesn't have Philippe Kahn's critical role brought out. This is a guy who is a key innovator in the high tech industry, who seems to have done it before, micral and after.... In reading this, there was the Danish offering, but nothing would have happened and it would have remained an obscure offering if Turbo Pascal had not come along. In fact the IDE in Compass pascal was super primitive, a simple command line interface. Many would say that the success of Turbo Pascal (over the Danish offering) was it's incredible edit->compile-> debug cycle. The Wordstar compatible editor was key at the time. I know that it was for me. The turbo Pascal compiler generated sloppy code compared to Pascal MT+ but the editor and the IDE turned it into a productivity machine. Un-matched today. That is I believe the key contribution of Philippe Kahn.
On another note, Kahn has continually stood up against Microsoft from day one. Unfortunately some of the key players in this story had switched sides and joined Microsoft (with huge signing bonuses...). Therefore there is huge pressure to rewrite history and minimize the contributions of anyone who stood up to the empire. Those dynamics are pretty obvious as history gets re-written. In fact even the person running Borland right now, Tod Nielsen, used to compete with Kahn in the early days. It's like a complete take-over. Our role here should be to get the facts correctly and not repeat re-written history by the "victorious empire". Just a word of caution. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.210.149.122 (talk • contribs) 00:19, 19 November 2006
:Noted. It's not that we particularly want to minimise Phillipe's contribution. It's just that we write what we know about. I know a little about the relationship between BLS Pascal, Compas and Turbo Pascal which is why I brought up the connection between the products and the role of Anders. Since you know something about Phillipe's role you should add that. That's the way that Wikipedia works. Of course it's best if you can cite some book to avoid accusations of Original Research but that's another story. By the way could you add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comments. It signs them and more importantly shows where they stop and other peoples' replies start. Cheers -- Derek Ross | Talk 05:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Philippe Kahn's Role

message: The examples on the page "use crt;"; however, all the (three) functions/procedures in the example code are standard Pascal stuff and none of them are certainly in the crt module. However, I don't have TP anymore, so I cannot test better examples. --213.139.171.67 10:09, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Better examples needed

message: Afaik a French version of 7.01 was freely available for a while from (then) inprise.fr. It can still be dled from the net and considered legal in most NGs.
88.159.74.100 08:16, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  free versions 

message: Generally, it made the article longer without adding something important, which is bad. But in particular, the MS compiler did not take up "two floppies, one for each pass of the compiler.". 
On a single floppy machine (standard at the time), the process was: save file to disk. take out disk. insert compiler disk. take out compiler disk, insert source disk again. take out source disk, insert target disk. take out target disk, insert compiler disk. take out compiler disk, insert target disk. take out target disk, insert linker disk. take out linker disk, insert target disk. See? You had to swap between program disks and data disks. That required multiple disk swaps (more than two), not a floppy for 'each pass'.  Also, not all people who owned MS Pascal stopped using it.150.101.166.15 07:16, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  undid bubba 

message: Firstly, this should be "sample code" again. "Code" is not singular in programming; you don't have "a code".
Secondly, the new example rings some alarm bells. The original version contains the comments "Program 11 / Written by Hensley Bass"; the new one omits the name, but keeps this "program" comment. Was this copied from somewhere? In addition, it doesn't contain any comments which might help a non-expert reader to understand what it's doing, and seeing as what it is doing is farily routine mathematical crunching rather than something which really shows the language off, I still think it's largely inappropriate.
Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:47, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The answer to the first issue is simple and has been dealt with. As for the example that I added, I have used the program myself, so it definitely works. The file was actually retrieved from http://pages.intnet.mu/jhbpage/main.htm, but I'm still sure that it can be used under fair use as it was already released as a zip file. As for the the difficulty of understanding it, that shouldn't be too bad. It uses standard codes for Turbo Pascal variables and data types. So, as I have already explained it on the bullet, it's really quite straightforward. ~ Troy (talk) 17:28, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ah. Please read Wikipedia:Non-free content. The example does not "significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic", so it fails our fair use criteria. It should be removed, and any replacement code should be appropriately licensed. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:41, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That sure sucks. In the meanwhile, I guess I'll have to look for a way to find an appropriate code. ~ Troy (talk) 17:45, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Sample codes" section 

message: In the second paragraph, first two sentences, it appears to state that IBM made a C compiler.  I don't believe this is true, at least I don't ever recall that IBM had one.  Can soeone please confirm this?  Microsoft didn't really make one either for the first several version of the "Microsoft C Compiler" they used a rebranded version of the then leader, Lattice C.  If IBM had a pascal compiler it was probably a rebranded version of the Microsoft Pascal Compiler.  Thanks.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.118.183.63 (talk) 02:33, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Motivation and Release 

message: With the Provision of Units from Turbo Pascal 4 Onwards it was possible to write Applications for GEM. A Series of Units were created for those versions of Turbo Pascal which came with instructions on building Applications which could be executed in GEM (an early Graphical User Interface written by Digital Research for the IBM PCs/XTs/286s & compatables). Not sure if this was something that Borland (the creators of Turbo Pascal) made or if Digital Reserch made it to allow applications to be written in Turbo Pascal or if it was from a 3rd party, however I think it was something one would purchase in order to do that.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cpm22 user (talk • contribs) 22:55, 12 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  In later versions of Turbo Pascal. 

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thread_title: File:Tp40 1987 01.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion

message: Only with screen shots can we get some idea of what it was actually like. Encyclopedant (talk) 22:56, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  This page needs screen shots 

message: There are a couple of places in the article that could be usefully referenced to the original Borland documentation -- which now exists as pdf files on the internet. Not sure about referencing to copyright pdfs though?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.206.162.148 (talk) 02:55, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: That would be okay. We reference copyright works all the time. -- Derek Ross | Talk 06:18, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference to Original documentation 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The link to the Runtime Error 200 page is now broken. The page was deleted by User:Explicit
So either the page should be restored or the information should be integrated in to this page.
AdamTheWebMan (talk) 04:54, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Runtime Error 200 

message: It would be good if the article had the dates of the various releases.  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 01:54, 27 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  version release dates 

message: FWIW, here is the TP 3.0 manual].  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 19:48, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  TP 3.0 manual 

message: RFenergy is  now claiming that TP3 had built-in turtle graphics. Yet they still refuse to give a source for this.  The source given did not make the TP version specific. It might have applied to 4 onwards.   
Also, was the Graphix Toolkit bundled or a separate library product? Griffiths987 (talk) 16:26, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The source provided specifically states V3.01 (a minor bug fix update to V3.0) had you bothered to read it. However, youre right that the Graphics (for those of us who can spell) Toolkit was not part of the original Turbo Pascal -RFenergy (talk) 16:34, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Graphix Toolbox (it was spelled that way) was a separate package (I had it), along with a numerical analysis package (I had it) and I believe a package for games (which I didn't have).  Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 17:30, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, just checked the manual again. 'Graphix' it is. -RFenergy (talk) 16:38, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turtle graphics 

message: Some editing has taken place on Turbo Pascal versions that operate with an 8087 coprocessor. An edit took place crediting V2 as being the first to have 8087 support as well as the BCD version. However, a subsequent flourish of edits has a reference present in the claim for V3 being first. My recollection is that V2 did offer 8087 and BCD versions. The reference does not look particularly good so does anyone have a better reference? -RFenergy (talk) 16:37, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right. There were two manuals for 2.0, the reference manual which was basically the same as the TP1 one and an addendum manual that had the changes, including an 8087 version of the software. Lovingboth (talk) 14:32, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turbo Pascal and the 8087 co-processor