Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)

TP is about the same size as Leor Zolman's C compiler for the 8080. Fast-forward about seven years, and my company was looking at an interpreted BASIC implementation that took about 120K. Since this was supposed to live in ROM, you could think about it as Real Money. We dug into it and found all kinds of fat -- the usual 13 fear-based reimplementations of strlen and strcpy, about a zillion porting layers, endless amounts of cut-and-paste nonsense. Somewhere between…

Turbo Pascal was an IDE and a blazingly fast compiler. In 1986, I ran it on my 64k IBM PC (8088 4MHz). It was like nothing else I had experienced previously. Prior to that, I had developed software in grad school on punch cards. I occasionally had access to a PDP-11. I don't remember what editor I used, but it certainly wasn't an IDE. It may have been line-oriented. At work, we had a VMS system, and I had access…

I think this is a little misleading since I don't think version 3 really was a "solid representation of the Turbo Pascal experience". Version 3 was pretty feature poor: no step through debugger, no pull-down menus in the IDE, etc. It's was just a bare-bones console editor and a COM-only compiler. It was the blue-background versions of the IDE that most people remember as "Turbo Pascal". That started with version 5. These versions were more than 10 times the size…

We used Turbo C++ in my HS computer science class, but the AP test was still in Pascal at the time. My dad had an old copy of Turbo Pascal, so I used that to learn enough pascal to pass the test. I was completely blown away by the compilation times. In class, we fought over who got the 2 486 DX2s because you could compile simple programs in under a minute on it. On my wimpy AM386 at home…