🚀 go-pugleaf

shack@cs.arizona.edu (David Shackelford) writes:

>Is it perhaps because a commercial organization created Turbo, and not
>an academic one?  Just a stab in the dark here, and I don't want to
>put words in your mouth.  Please elaborate on this position, as I've
>never heard anyone say it quite that way.

Quite possibly. See my distinction below.

[]

>I do have a complaint about Turbo myself -- it's a PC only program,
>and thus as non-portable as you can get.  My earlier statement that I
>wished other Pascal's were more Turbo-like is that I'd rather not
>change my own way of programming.  Selfish?  It's my opinion, you're
>free to make your own!  

>I viewed the differences between Turbo and Standard Pascal to be
>enhancements on Turbo's part, but some have pointed out that there are
>standard programs that TP doesn't have a clue what to do with.  Also,
>it appears that standard Pascal is not the dead language the PC press
>reports it to be.

In my opinion the differences are so many that it would be appropriate
to consider standard Pascal and Turbo Pascal to be two different
languages, even though they are closely related. This might seem to be
going to far, but I'll state two facts two support the claim:

1) Testing compatibility with Standard Pascal TurboPascal gets very
poor ratings (in one partivular test I saw, it only managed 50 %) and
I gather Standard Pascal would fare even worse in a test the other way
around.

2) Turbo Pascal does not follow the basic filosophy of Standards
Pascal. The case-statement is one example of this, but it is most
evident in the way Turbo Pascal manage procedures as parameters: You
make a the procedure or function a type! This is mixing two distinct
concepts namely data and algorithms. This mixture is taken from C (I
guess), where it is the logical way to handle things, but in Standard
Pascal it is in-alovable.

Mind you, this is not said to bash TurboPascal, merely to make it
clear that they are two different languages, with their seperat
purposeses.

Standard Pascal is a small, neat languages, well fittes to teach the
basics of programming and for solving smaller problems, but whenever
the code reaches a size about of 10K, it becomes hard to manages. SP
was newer intended to be a serius language, it was *meant* for
teaching.

Turbo Pascal on the other hand is a tool for the professional, with a
lot of possibilities to split the program in smaller units and with a
lot of premade modules to avoid tedious programming of I/O-manement,
mathematical formulas etc.

Viewed in this light the whole argument is just another
"my-languages-is-better-than-your-languages" religious war. Shouldn't
we use this newsgroup for something better.

That Turbo Pascal IMHO is an unholy mixture of C, standard Pascal and
Modula-2, well thats just *my* prejudice.

>As for what to use in the contests, the basic questions comes down
>to "How many know the features of each type of Pascal", and "Which
>Pascal runs best on the hardware for the contest".  I don't know
>the answer to the first question.  On a PC, the answer to the second
>question is Turbo because it has no competition.  If the contest
>isn't run on PC's, then Turbo is out of the running.  SO if Pascal
>is to be the language, it comes down to what the hardware is.

All too true. To many people think that TP is the standard, just
because on the PC-market it almost is.
-- 

Kristian Damm Jensen (dat0@diku.dk)
Institute of datalogi, University of Copenhagen (DIKU)
Universitetsparken 1, DK-2100 Copenhagen \, Denmark