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Turbo Pascal 6.0 (vs. others) (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 21.02.2020, 10:38

> > rr's UPXDUMP was at least compatible with TP55, but I think he calls
> > TP7/BP7 the "best ever" (or was it TP6? Meh, close enough).
>
> It was (and still is) TP6. :-D
>
> But maybe I'm a little biased, because that's the version I started with in
> the 1990s. And I couldn't afford TP7 from my apprenticeship salary.
It's very confusing. There are too many competing versions. I assume you mean TP 6.0 Professional. How much was TP7, comparatively? You mean TP 7.01 or "Borland Pascal 7 with Objects" (DOS and Windows)? (Some old versions are still around for sale on EMSPS or eBay.)

I stumbled upon the release announcement blurb online recently but can't find it now. TP 5.5 freeware lacks Turbo Debugger 1.5 and Turbo Assembler 1.0 (one-pass only?) that were in Professional. Apparently, in 1989 dollars, that was $150 (or $250 for Pro), which is worth twice that now, due to inflation. I know TP6 added BASM for inline, so maybe that means lacking TASM 2.0 for hobby users wasn't as crucial. (Heck, just use DEBUG and Inline(...) for 5.5. Or NASM or A86, which both claim to somehow work.)

Back in 2007 or so, due to my minimal hacking on PAQ8o8, I actually downloaded Turbo C++ Explorer (not Delphi, sadly) for free. It never installed properly (some .NET mixup), plus that old laptop died, so I never properly learned C++. (C++11 and later heavily changed everything anyways.) It did come with TASM32 5.3 (Win32), which I still have. I still want to convert a few external projects to rely on Free/libre assemblers. (I wouldn't consider PSR Invaders very important, but it's still fun to think about.)

Even Delphi (celebrating 25 years) has a Community freeware edition nowadays, for up to five developers earning less than $5000/year. But FreePascal is so much better, thus I never bothered. (Yeah, you can probably use both, but I haven't. Then again, I don't know Delphi dialect(s).)

Haven't you tried FPC's i8086-msdos (ppcross8086)? I don't really understand their recent snapshot versioning (anything past 3.1.1, stuck in April 2018). I don't know what their plans are. Are they stuck migrating to Git? (GCC just finished their own migration.) Anyways, the output isn't nearly as small as TP, but it's a better compiler. The proper 3.0.x release versions are still using slow NASM + WLINK, which is still quite good but a bit slow for smartlinking (unlike newer snapshots). I can't think of any other obvious, major reason to exclusively stick to TP other than familiarity, strict compatibility, 16-bit hosting, etc. I tend to test my own wimpy code out on a variety of TP-compatible compilers, just to iron out any hidden bugs.

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