Turbo Pascal was the first language in which I had serious classes (I had tutoring in Applesoft Basic earlier on, but that language has a lot of limitations), and I used it for years afterwards. You could write auxiliary functions in Turbo Assembler and link them in; I used that to write a library that allowed access to the 320x200 256-color VGA mode (the built-in graphics only did EGA and were super slow), and other libraries for mouse and joystick control. I tried to control the soundblaster for FM synthesis, but it was too complicated for me to figure out how to do anything useful without better access to documentation (this was before the world wide web). The experience also taught me a lot about assembly language basics, function calling conventions for C and Pascal, stack manipulation, and so forth, which gave me a huge head start in my compilers courses at university.
On the whole I would still recommend C over Pascal as an early language–it gives you much better insight into memory layout and so forth, where Pascal kind of obfuscates such things, and C just generally kind of acts like both Pascal and Assembler rolled together. But Turbo Pascal definitely gave me a good foundation.
I loved Turbo Pascal so much. Wrote my own DOS windowing system. When the object oriented stuff came out,it was mind blowing but still so accessible.
It was a simpler time.
I don’t have “heroes” per say, but Anders Hejlsberg is up there.
Generations of programmers have benefited from his work. His focus on ergonomics in C# made the language a total powerhouse.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It is 40 years since Turbo Pascal revolutionized the coding marketplace with a slick (for the time) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and performance to spare.
Turbo Pascal was released in 1983 and represented a shift from the traditional way programming tools worked in the early days of IBM PC compatibles.
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.
Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger.
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.
The language might have offended Pascal purists and the IDE seems a little clunky nowadays when compared to modern tools.
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Trubo Pascacal
