bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine) (11/15/90)
With Turbo 6.0 now a reality, I would like to take the time to
present this unsolicited opinion of Turbo Pascal vs. Microsoft
Pascal. (A few posters seem to want to know...).
Hit the 'n' key right now if you're not interested in a rather
biased opinion.
I am the proud? owner of both Turbo and MS Pascal. I have made
a few discoveries over the last year or so about the relative
merits of each.
Microsoft Pascal touts complete Turbo pascal 5.0 compatibility.
This is blatantly not true. (I am appalled that several magazine
articles have missed this point.) Admittedly, I have found only
one difference: overlays. Turbo 5.0 has extensive overlay support
to allow you to run programs larger than available memory. Quick
pascal 1.0 has no such support. Worse, the index in the back of the
documentation mentions a page reference for the overlay unit several
times. The indexed reference is nowhere to be found.
As for the documentation itself, if you buy Quick Pascal, plan on
spending money for a Turbo 5.0 language reference unless you are
the most novice of programmers. The documentation is lacking in
most of the fine details of the language implementation. True,
this is the audience Microsoft was targeting.
Execution speed? Generally suffers compared to Turbo, especially
in disk I/O intensive applications.
Executable size? My rough guess (from eyeballing files created
by both with comparable compiler directives) is that Turbo usually
produces 10-20% smaller programs.
Compile time? Forget it. Turbo can compile and link your program
5x in the time it takes Quick Pascal to do it once.
Development environment? Quick Pascal is the winner hands down,
though I understand that Turbo 6.0 now has the new environment, which
I have been impressed with in Turbo C++ (I know, I'm a junkie.)
Summary: Unless your programs tend to consist of writeln('Hello, world');
don't bother with Quick Pascal. In the end, you'll be glad you didn't.
Bob Beauchaine
bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COMsiegfried_r@spcvxb.spc.edu (11/30/90)
In article <6302@vice.ICO.TEK.COM>, bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine) writes: > > With Turbo 6.0 now a reality, I would like to take the time to > present this unsolicited opinion of Turbo Pascal vs. Microsoft > Pascal. (A few posters seem to want to know...). > > I am the proud? owner of both Turbo and MS Pascal. I have made > a few discoveries over the last year or so about the relative > merits of each. > > Summary: Unless your programs tend to consist of writeln('Hello, world'); > don't bother with Quick Pascal. In the end, you'll be glad you didn't. I was told several years ago about several bugs in Microsoft Pascal. Given the popularity of Turbo Pascal, I would think that adhering to the ISO standard would not be important. My experience with Microsoft FORTRAN taught me that their User Support people did not always know what they were talking about. Two phone calls connected me to two very pleasant people who gave me WRONG answers most politely to questions about building libraries without a hard disk, something I still have not discovered how to do. The compiler itself (version 5) works quite well, but my experience makes me question the overall quality of their products, especially given their most famous kludge, OS/2. If only Borland would develop Turbo DOS and Turbo FORTRAN. Then I could ditch Microsoft(tm) altogether. Disclaimer: These are not my opinion; I only rented them. Robert Siegfried Computer Science Dept. Saint Peter's College Jersey City, NJ 07306 siegfried_r@spcvxa.spc.edu
ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (11/30/90)
In article <1990Nov29.172808.810@spcvxb.spc.edu> siegfried_r@spcvxb.spc.edu writes: >In article <6302@vice.ICO.TEK.COM>, bobb@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Bob Beauchaine) > writes: >> Summary: Unless your programs tend to consist of writeln('Hello, world'); >> don't bother with Quick Pascal. In the end, you'll be glad you didn't. > >quite well, but my experience makes me question the overall quality of their >products, especially given their most famous kludge, OS/2. > > If only Borland would develop Turbo DOS and Turbo FORTRAN. Then I >could ditch Microsoft(tm) altogether. I lend my support to this healthy strain of microsoft-bashing! The world might have been a different place if IBM had asked Borland to do an OS for PS/2, eh?? I'm really petrified at the thought of being locked out of Turbo Pascal 7+ if Borland makes it Windows-only. I actually paid for Windows and then rm -rf'ed it. (BTW, I boot my box with MKS Toolkit, a product I wholeheartedly endorse. For all MS-DOS haters with nowhere to go because you couldn't stomach windows, this is the place) -- _______________________________________________________________________________ Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu The more things change, the more they stay insane. _______________________________________________________________________________
hp0p+@andrew.cmu.edu (Hokkun Pang) (11/30/90)
>I lend my support to this healthy strain of microsoft-bashing! >The world might have been a different place if IBM had asked >Borland to do an OS for PS/2, eh?? > >I'm really petrified at the thought of being locked out of Turbo >Pascal 7+ if Borland makes it Windows-only. I actually paid for >Windows and then rm -rf'ed it. I still keep it because I have the 50M of free space on my hard drive. Sooner or later, I will definitely wipefile c:\windows\*.* /s. (unless Borland wants to take over the development of Winodws 4.0 :-> ). On the other hand, DOS's 640K limit is really a problem. If it doesn't exist, we probably will have a lot more goodies such as Common Lisp by now.
pschwart@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Paul Schwartz) (12/01/90)
In article <28521@usc>, ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes... > >I lend my support to this healthy strain of microsoft-bashing! Me too! >(BTW, I boot my box with MKS Toolkit, a product I wholeheartedly >endorse. For all MS-DOS haters with nowhere to go because you >couldn't stomach windows, this is the place) What is MKS Toolkit? Bashing minds want to know. - Z - +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | PauL M SchwartZ | | | PSCHWART@macc.wisc.edu | Your message here... | | PSCHWART@wiscmacc.BitNet | only 5$ per post | | (608)255-5702 | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+