Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Turbo Pascal 1.0 is 25 years old

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Twenty-five years ago (on 20 November 1983 to be precise), something I consider very important happened: Borland released Turbo Pascal 1.0.

Turbo Pascal 1.0 was a small software application (only 68 kilobytes) that ran on MS-DOS and CP/M and which featured an IDE to develop console applications using the Pascal programming language.

 

I believe Turbo Pascal 1.0 was an important milestone because it allowed countless people of my age to learn structured programming using a programming language created by someone who was an expert in creating programming languages but also teaching and pedagogy, Niklaus Wirth. I believe that many students (and I am not alone) have difficulties learning programming today because of our focus on C-like languages like C++ and Java which are excellent tools for professionals but oh so lousy for teaching the Art of Programming.

I wrote a blog entry in 2007 to explain how I became a programmer. I wrote about my affection for Turbo-Pascal and GW-BASIC. [Incidentally, I believe a modern equivalent would be DrScheme which I like a lot and which I used last year to teach (sound) programming techniques to second year university students.]

Here is a small Hello World programme written in Pascal:

Program HelloWorld(output);
Begin
    Writeln('Hello, World!')
End.

A big thank you to all those who made Turbo-Pascal 1.0 possible.

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Comments

  2. Yeah. 25 years have passed but I still have a lot of affection for those old IDEs which only required one floppy disk (remember those?)

  3. My first real programming language i learnt and did most craziest thing that i wanted to… actually that’s what made me find programming cooler than i already thought. [before that i had those dbase3 stuffs and qbasic, which i did find nice], but i really started having fun when i started learning turbo pascal.

    There was a time i used to play with it to make lots of crt graphics with turbo pascal [and lots of flashing colors display on screen which would now make me sick just watching it, but then i found it beautiful].

    lol am getting nostalgic :p used to be wake up everyday thinking up “what kind of mischievious app can i write in pascal to piss up my friends today in class”.

  4. ahh yeah, it took me quite a time to understand how to use those debugger options, breakpoints etc.. in that textbased ide, i had no idea what those were until i started using pascal [never cared about it in qbasic]

  5. What’s new boy ? melancholic about the past? I can still remember the daft green letters on my monochromatic screen on my 1st computer. When I started on Amiga, I felt like riding on a crest ….! but now they have dissolved into a sepia haze. I did my 1st animation on an Amiga.

  6. Dear Avinash,
    Thx for being yourself, it is the first time I have felt the impulse of interacting with a Mauritian blogger. No prejudice, but just away from the puddle of ‘Beaches, picnic, landscapes ..or plain non salivating blurbs. Reckon with 350,000 users of DSL, there should be more like you on this scape. But thx for populating the network.
    Good work !

  7. Hi Manzerkrane,

    Thanks for the nice words. It’s great to know that people like the way I blog. As a matter of fact, It’s sometimes tough to be a blogger but oh so satisfying… thanks to people like you :-)

  8. Cool, 25 years – pascal.

    After Dbase III plus, I got the opportunity to have a greater interest in Programming by having fun with Pascal.

    I really enjoyed this programming language. Very Structured, Disciplined way of doing things.

    However, the mystery:
    Is Object Oriented Supported in Pascal?
    If so, could we have a code snippet that demonstrates the basic OOP concepts please?

    Thank you

  9. Strange enough, I didn’t get acquainted to programming when languages such as this one were the hit. I remember taking math lessons at the beginning of the 90s in a class where the teacher also gave programming lessons to Uni students in Mauritius and I was just like: “Wow, these guys must be freaking intelligent!”.

    The only problem for me was that, like in many Mauritian families, the parents decided of your future and mine did not want me to get into computer science because “professer anglais tape bel casse”. Some 10 years later I was studying Java2 and C in a French University.

  11. unit PascalOOExample;

    interface

    type
    THelloWorldPrinter = class
    private
    const Text: string = ‘Hello World’;
    public
    procedure Execute; virtual;
    end;

    TGoodbyeWorldPrinter = class(THelloWorldPrinter)
    public
    procedure Execute; override;
    end;

    implementation

    procedure THelloWorldPrinter.Execute;
    begin
    Writeln(Text);
    end;

    procedure TGoodbyeWorldPrinter.Execute;
    begin
    inherited;
    writeln(‘Goodbye world’);
    end;

    end.

  13. Turbo Pascal changed my life. I still remember those days in early 80s, Turbo Pascal on CP/M machines. I like Pascal because it is easy to write and easy to read. I also wrote Pascal compiler for 8051 microcontrollers (available for free at http://turbo51.com/ ). Thanks to Borland and Anders Hejlsberg for this fantastic piece of software.

  15. Some time ago I wrote Turbo Pascal compiler in Turbo Pascal. Now the code is published at http://turbopascal.org/http://turbopascal.org/

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