November 28, 2023
Turbo Pascal was introduced by Borland in November 1983. It's officially turning 40 years old this month.
Turbo Pascal was a milestone product for the industry, it started Borland as a company and it was the first popular Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It was a great product for the time, and its success was incredible.
You can read more about Turbo Pascal it in this recent blog post from David I, but also on Wikipedia and many other sources including blog posts of mine, including the talk I did this summer in the first Pascal World Congress in Salamanca.
At Embarcadero, the company continuing working on the successors of Turbo Pascal, we just shipped version 36 of that compiler. In fact when you read "Embarcadero Delphi for Win32 compiler version 36.0" (the version of the command line compiler in Delphi 12 Athens) the compiler version number, 36, dates back to the first Turbo Pascal. Not only that, we decided to dedicate the product Easter Egg to this great anniversary.
Happy 40th birthday, Turbo Pascal!
posted by
marcocantu @ 4:17PM | 14 Comments
[0 Pending]
14 Comments
Turbo Pascal turns 40
In the early days, compilers were mostly a pain, interpreted basic was slow and awful. The editors were bad, the tools were limited to batch files. Turbo Pascal was so fast, compiling and runtime, and it was so easy to edit, compile and run. Later, forgot what version, the ability to run assembler code was a big upgrade. One of my favorite tools of all time!
Comment by Randy Lea on November 28, 22:26
Turbo Pascal turns 40
Very cool but you need not that semicolon before
“end” statement
Comment by Liviu on November 29, 00:38
Turbo Pascal turns 40
Happy 40!
Comment by Paul Max
[]
on November 29, 01:05
Turbo Pascal turns 40
I remember my aunt being in university 25 years ago, and me trying
to login on her computer and the first program that I found was Turbo
Pascal. And I still believe that until now it is one of the main reasons
I went into programming.
Happy 40 Turbo Pascal!
Comment by Elias Bourgess
[https://ebourgess.dev]
on November 29, 07:31
Turbo Pascal turns 40
You are right, we Pascal uses semicolons as statement separator, not
as a statement terminator like curly brace languages. But it doesn't
mind an extra semicolon...
Comment by Marco Cantu
[http://www.marcocantu.com]
on November 29, 09:16
Turbo Pascal turns 40
It was Turbo Pascal that I used on the 'new' PCs when introduced at
Uni, loved the IDE compared to the very slow Pascal on old Prime
mainframe and terminals that we had to use before. Then got a job,
chose the similar IDE of Borland C++ (with GEM GUI), and when it
came time to move to Windows, it was an easy choice - Delphi!
Been using it ever since, just updating almost a million lines of code
to Delphi 12.
The moral of the story is - give your product free to Universities and
Students and you may get a lifetime of professional loyalty!
Comment by Chris Mark
[http://www.edinst.com]
on November 29, 10:16
Turbo Pascal turns 40
Turbo Pascal wasn't my first programing language, but it was the
one I fell in love with. I learned it in a high school CS class and used
it in programming contests, even going to state competition. Moved
to C in college, but Turbo Pascal will always be my first love.
Comment by Lachlan
[http://lachlanlife.net]
on November 29, 11:50
Turbo Pascal turns 40
Turbo Pascal is my first lang! Happy 40!
Comment by DW on November 29, 16:51
Turbo Pascal turns 40
I first encountered TP in ‘85, just out of
a CS degree at uni, working for a tiny investment
house in London. We hired a consulting firm to
write us an accounting system, and it was TP and
Btrieve! This was a revelation after coming out of
uni and using mainframes. It served me well for
the next few years, and I kept at it with the
various incarnations until 2011. Happy 40th TP!
Comment by Eric Allen
[http://ericallen.x10host.com]
on December 1, 20:52
Turbo Pascal turns 40
During my time at MIT in the late 90s, I first discovered Turbo
Pascal on an old IBM PC in our computer lab. It was quite the shift
from the theory-heavy courses, bringing a hands-on approach to
programming. That experience, albeit with frequent system crashes,
solidly influenced my career in tech
Comment by Mike ET
[https://stakingy.com]
on December 5, 15:04
Turbo Pascal turns 40
I was privileged to use it as I am grown up by now
But still using D10.2.3
Comment by shlomo abuisak
[http://www.limelect.co]
on December 6, 16:24
How old is PolyPascal?
I started using TurboPascal when it was PolyPascal.
My mom had started a software company with Thomas Hejlsberg,
brother of Anders Hejlsberg who created PolyPascal, which Borland
bought and turned into TurboPascal. The software my mom and
Thomas created were written using PolyPascal, and I got turned onto
it that way, and loved it. I was maybe 14 years old at the time.
It was my love language for many many years, until the internet came
along and I moved to writing software for the browser.
❤️
Comment by Calvin Correli
[https://calvincorreli.com]
on December 10, 12:05
Turbo Pascal turns 40
Just noticed this, man. Time flies...
Got into it with version 3, quite usable for the day, and totally in tune
with Wirth's tight single-pass ideas for Pascal. I say this literally
while going through the Pascal-6000 compiler sources (4.1.0) trying
to add a ftn5 keyword, which was never done, even in the final 1986
incarnation. Very readable sources. I digress. Wirth's own compiler
was a fast single pass job with optimization.
I learned Pascal on an 11/44 using Oregon software's. Turbo made it
real tho.
Comment by Jim Bryant on December 16, 20:50
Turbo Pascal turns 40
Turbo Pascal was a great language to learn and use. It had a simple
syntax, a fast compiler, and a powerful IDE. I also started with it in
high school and enjoyed solving problems with it.
Comment by Givi Balashvili
[https://america-auto.com/contacts]
on February 8, 06:51
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