#TURBO PASCAL 3.0 HOW TO#
How to installįirst download Turbo Pascal 3.01a for CP/M-80 and unzip the archive.
This meant that you could quickly get up and running with few additional resources. It covered not just the IDE, language and libraries, but also detailed information on the memory layout and calling conventions from assembly language. My only gripe is that TP doesn't support procedures and functions passed as parameters.įinally, Borland included a highly readable and very complete manual. However, if you aren't using any of the operating system specific calls, then you can easily port to the MS-DOS and CP/M-86 versions.
As with all Pascal implementations, there are problems porting programs between implementations.
#TURBO PASCAL 3.0 MANUAL#
The standard library offers a good range of functions and TP keeps quite close to Standard Pascal as defined by Jensen & Wirth in their ' User Manual and Report'. With careful planning, you could escape the normal 64Kb limit and only be constrained by the capacity of the disk you are running the application from. The running code could now be swapped in and out from disk as needed. In 1986 Borland released Turbo Pascal 3.0 which added support for overlays. The latter option allows you to create libraries in assembly language and use a jump table to access individual functions with the external keyword. If you need parts of your program to run faster, you can always embed inline machine code into functions/procedures or access functions in external binaries. However, for many applications this won't be much of an issue compared to the increased programmer productivity. The downside of the compilation speed is that the code is quite a literal translation without much optimization. Pascal was designed to be easy to compile and because TP uses a single pass compiler, compilation speed is incredibly quick. The editor is very functional and uses a subset of the Wordstar key combinations. This is particularly handy for single disk machines. Since the IDE is only 34Kb there is plenty of space left on a disk for your source code and compiled programs. With TP you get an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), so that you can edit, compile and run all from the same application. Turbo Pascal combined ease of use, power, speed and a great manual all for the really low price of $49.95. When Turbo Pascal was released in 1983 by Borland, as their first software development application, it was quickly adopted by schools, universities, hobbyists and professional software developers. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alone. CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.