Reminiscing about Turbo Pascal
14 points by abnercoimbre
14 points by abnercoimbre
I never did anything serious in Turbo Pascal, don't think I ever used its debugger, and I didn't find its IDE revolutionary either - it was the first IDE I saw, and thought it was normal. The one single thing I always remember fondly about, and something I rarely saw since was the sheer amount of documentation and examples that came with it. Turbo Pascal's help system (at least 5.5's or 6.0's, not sure which version was where I discovered the help system...) was full of details, and examples, about literally anything.
I learned to write Pascal from that help system. It was amazing. 30+ years later, I still remember it fondly, I can still picture my young self spending hours upon hours navigating from one page to the other, ingesting all the information.
Is there anything that comes close to it today in your experience?
Emacs, but while it comes close, it doesn't reach Turbo Pascal, when it comes to documentation. Emacs' documentation is vast, and comprehensive, and has a lot of examples, yes, but Turbo Pascal was far easier to navigate.
It was also more limited, which I guess helped a lot: there wasn't an incomprehensible amount of it. Emacs is sometimes overwhelming in a way TP never was.
I loved Turbo Pascal. When I got my degree Pascal was the teaching language of choice so being able to code in it at my first job was comforting.
At one point I wrote a dial-up kind of bbs thing to allow access to a back-end system via terminal emulation.
The limit to 255 character strings still makes me sad.
I am a bit younger than OP I think but my first programming language was Delphi 5 which is just Pascal with Forms as I understand it.
Weirdly I still have a Stack Overflow answer from the early days that still gets traffic. It was something about saving a RichTextEdit field to the database.
I loved the YouTube video he references: a 2-hour tutorial on VHS tape! And I really resonate with one of the comments:
Its interesting the depth he goes into about the UI, a lot of features which would be considered common sense now since the conventions have since solidified.
I used to use this in emulation with my Atari St! It was such a nice turbo Pascal thing versus the terrible one that we had to use on the stupid mainframe!