40 years of Turbo Pascal: Memories of the Coding Dinosaur that Revolutionized IDEs

TechSpot remembers that Turbo Pascal "stands out as one of the first instances of an integrated development environment (IDE), providing a text-based interface through which developers could write their code, compile it, and finally link it with runtime libraries."The early IDE, written in Assembly, eschewed the use of floppies, instead building the code directly in RAM for an unprecedented performance boost. The language demonstrated superior speed, greater convenience, and a more affordable price compared to its competition. Philippe Kahn, Borland's CEO who initially conceptualized turning the new language into an all-in-one product, decided to sell the software via mail orders for just $49.95, establishing a market presence for the then-newly founded company. It was called "Turbo" because its use of RAM made it considerable faster, adds the Register:Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool... Version 1 had limitations. Source code files, for example, were limited to 64 KB. It would only produce .COM executable files for DOS and CP/M - although other architectures and operating systems were supported. It would also run from a single floppy disk, saving users from endless swapping in a world where single drives were the norm and a hard disk seemed impossibly exotic - and expensive... However, it was with version 4, in 1987, that Turbo Pascal changed dramatically. For one, support for CP/M and CP/M-86 was dropped, and the compiler would generate .EXE executables under DOS, lifting the .COM restrictions... For this writer, 1989's version 5.5 was peak Turbo Pascal. Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger. Version 6 and 7 brought in inline assembly and support for the creation of Windows executables and DLLs respectively, but version 7 also marked the end of the line as far as Borland was concerned. Turbo Pascal for Windows would turn up, but was eventually superseded by Delphi. However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS. As for Turbo Pascal, several versions were eventually released by Borland as freeware including version 1 for DOS, 5.5, and 7. I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal. (Functions, subroutines, and procedures...) Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?

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