🚀 go-pugleaf

               All  things  being  equal,  i.e. in a world without Philippe
          Kahn or Borland, I would rather  program  in  C  than  in Pascal.
          However, in  the DOS world, all things are nowhere close to being
          equal.  Borland's Turbo Pascal should probably be  the "standard"
          programming language for 80 percent of the programming which gets
          done (outside of professional  software  houses  such  as Ashton-
          Tate) on today's XTs and ATs etc.  A catalogue of  justifications
          for this statement will seem long-winded, but here goes:

          1.   Price:  at a retail price of around  $70 and  a street price
               of  around  $55,  Turbo  is  nearly  free.  Reasonable DOS C
               compilers go for  around  $300  and  the  only  reasonable C
               INTERPRETER goes  for around $450.  Keep this point in mind;
               compilers and interpreters  both  have  their  place  in the
               scheme of  things and  Turbo functions  as both.  Few if any
               other packages make this claim.

          2.   Turbo, both in its interpreter (actually, compile to memory)
               and its  compile (to  .com) modes,  produces very fast code.
               Further, the compiler itself is almost  supernaturally fast,
               typical 2000  line programs  compiling in  15 seconds on 6mh
               ATs.  A CCI Power-6 (rated 10 times  VAX 780  compute power)
               cannot match this with one user on the system.  This is like
               having your cake and  eating it;   my  understanding is that
               Turbo  generates  something  closely  akin to the old UCSD P
               code as lines are keyed in  and  runs  from  there  when the
               compile directive  is given.   Most  DOS C compilers, by the
               way, will  take  several  minutes  to  compile  a  2000 line
               program, even  on an AT.  Such differences in compiler speed
               will translate into a programmer getting 10 shots at solving
               a problem in an hour, versus two.

          3.   Turbo has the only completely believable debugging system in
               the  Micro  world.    All  other  debugging  systems amongst
               micros,  to  my  knowledge,  involve  breakpoints and single
               stepping.  In  real  life,  blowups  in  real-world programs
               usually occur  on the  876'th pass  of some 200 line logical
               loop;  who in hell wants to single step through all of that?
               The ONLY  thing I  ever want to know when a program blows up
               is the line number on which it blew;   Turbo  not only tells
               me that, it puts me right on that line in its editor.  

          4.   Turbo is a cleanly and elegantly structured language;  it is
               relatively  easy  to  write  large  and   logically  complex
               programs  and  have  the  logic  of  them  be visible to the
               programmer maintaining the software.  This  is the  point on
               which Basic fails outright.  

          5.   Turbo  is  a  large  super-set  of  standard  Pascal, with a
               tremendously good interface into  DOS and  PC functionality,
               things which  lie outside  of any  of the ANSI standards for
               programming languages.  It is actually better than  Basic in
               this regard.   It  actually allows machine-coded routines to
               be imbedded right into  Turbo routines  (Turbo inline code),
               allows DOS  calls with  the use  of only one simple register
               structure, and has easy systems for  addressing segments and
               offsets of  Turbo variables,  labels etc.   Such code can be
               made  as  fast  as  is  possible  on  80x86  devices.   Masm
               interfaces for  the various  C compilers are not as clean or
               elegant.

          6.   Turbo has several good  systems  for  dealing  with graphics
               applications,   including   the   "turtle"  system.    These
               capabilities go beyond those  of Basic  or other programming
               languages available for DOS machines.

          7.   Turbo  is  heavily  supported  by after-market and free-ware
               packages and applications.   Typical bulletin  boards in the
               DC  area  will  have  20  C-related  files on hand, 45 Basic
               files, and 200 Turbo files.   C programmers  end up spending
               an extra  $100 or $200 for a new function library every time
               they turn around.  For  Turbo,  an  unbelieveable  number of
               such items  are lying  around free.   Things  of this nature
               which are lying about on the  various D.C.  area   BBS's and
               from the PC SIG (and which are, hence, free) include:

                    a.   A sprite  editor and very clean and elegant system
                         for producing animation and  cartoon effects using
                         Turbo.

                    b.   An assembler which generates accurate Turbo inline
                         code.  This is a biggie  and could  be used  to do
                         nearly anything which could ever be done on a PC.

                    c.   A good screen font creation and editing system for
                         Turbo.

                    d.   A system for handling Dbase3 files.

                    e.   A system for handling Lotus (wks) files.

                    f.   A good asynchronous line handling routine  for use
                         in writing communications packages.

                    g.   Several  very  good  general  purpose  window  and
                         menuing   packages   etc.,   including   one,  the
                         "Boosters"  library,  which  is  comparable to the
                         best C library I've seen.

                    h.   A fast-fourrier transform system.

                    i.   A system  for writing  memory-resident programs in
                         Turbo.

                    j.   A system for executing other programs  from within
                         a Turbo program.


               A user  willing to spend a little money judiciously has some
          even more interesting options,  most  notably  the  TurboPower TP
          compiler  which  compiles  to  .exe files and can generate large-
          model (640K) code and do linking.  This one goes for about $70.
          The TurboPower  system answers  the only  semi-major problem most
          users would  have regarding  Turbo, i.e. "What do you do when you
          need to write really big programs?".  

               The other thing which bothers some people regarding Turbo is
          the fact  that it isn't totally "standard".  This is the one case
          I know of in which the Ansi standard   is really  kind of  a joke.
          With  500,000  users,  Turbo  IS  the  real  standard  for  Pascal
          in the Micro World, pure and simple.