Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler

Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by analog31 on Friday September 11, 2015 @08:40AM (#10203301)

My dad, who knew nothing about computers, saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about this guy with a new business model for selling software. On a whim, he got me a copy for my birthday. It was TP version 1.

I stuck with TP through version 5, and even convinced my college teachers to let me use it for my programming assignments rather than whatever was on the college mainframe.

The manuals were indeed a huge asset. You didn't really need to know anything about the OS, or go digging for third party documentation online, which was important because there was no online.

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Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by vetinari on Friday September 11, 2015 @10:40AM (#10203899)

I learned programming by digging through TP6 online help.

That and Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, so I could do something useful.

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Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by analog31 on Friday September 11, 2015 @01:25PM (#10204957)

Oops! What I meant was, there was no such thing as "online" at all, when TP1 came out. ;-)

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Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by vetinari on Friday September 11, 2015 @05:37PM (#10206310)

Online as in "hlp file that's shown when you press F1". At the time online meant "not printed" :-)

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Re:Internals of a Turbo Pascal Compiler by analog31 on Friday September 11, 2015 @06:28PM (#10206490)

Ah, yes. Now I get it. I'm kinda slow on the uptake sometimes. ;-)

I stopped with TP5. At that point, I was up to my ears in my thesis project, and was not going to change any of my tools. Plus I'm a real tightwad. By the time I finally finished my degree, got a new job, and a new computer, it was an Apple Mac. And the modern OS's kind of killed my interest in programming for a while.

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