mpe@shamash.cdc.com (Mike Ebsen) (10/30/90)
The word on the street is that the news release for Borland Turbo Pascal V6.0 will occur on Nov 6. No additional information is available, however, there are many consistant rumors about V6.0 in beta test for the last XYZ months.
ace@cc.ic.ac.uk (Andriko del Saludo) (11/09/90)
Well, guys an' gals today it got released here in the UK, and BORLAND threw a big bash to present it. It looks really good, especially the IDE and the Turbo Vision environment. Speed contrary to other reports seems pretty good on a Toshiba laptop (386 presumably). The biggest surprise, however, was a sneak preview of !!!!YOU GUESSED IT!!! TP for windows. It is a full Windows 3 app and generates nice windows code. Projected released date is first half of '91 (i.e. June or thereabouts). The two interesting points are first that it seems not to need the SDK (Poor usoft losing $500 per user) and that the code from Turbo Vision apps might be portable to Windows. I am not sure about either but that was hinted in the demo. The bad news is that more manuals and more disk space is needed again. About 3.5 Mb for the compiler alone (never mind TDEBUG etc) and something like six manuals (loose leaf thank God). I ordered my copy on the spot. disclaimer : I have nothing to do with Borland (sometimes I wish I did) but am only a satisfied (sometimes) customer. ace -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- - Andreas C. Enotiadis (ace@cc.ic.ac.uk, ace@grathun1.earn, etc) - - (I'm still thinking about something clever to put here...) - ---------------------------------------------------------------------
ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (11/09/90)
In article <1990Nov8.234636.16175@cc.ic.ac.uk> ace@cc.ic.ac.uk (Andriko del Saludo) writes: > > Well, guys an' gals today it got released here in the UK, and BORLAND > threw a big bash to present it. It looks really good, especially the > IDE and the Turbo Vision environment. What is Turbo Vision?? > seems pretty good on a Toshiba laptop (386 presumably). The biggest > surprise, however, was a sneak preview of !!!!YOU GUESSED IT!!! TP for > windows. It is a full Windows 3 app and generates nice windows code. Wait a minute: does this mean that to use Turbo Pascal 7.0, I have no option but to run Windows? IMHO that would be a terrible decision! There are supposed to be 30e6 to 40e6 PCs out there, with 1e6 or so Windows machines. Further, more end-users are attracted to Windows as compared with hobbyist-programmers who make up a good fraction of Borland's audience in buying $100-$200 compilers. (You guessed it, I bought Windows 3 and rm -rf'ed it!) But seriously: what are the changes in Turbo 6.0 other than a prettier frontend? Is there any reason for a tpc 5.5 user to buy 6.0?? "Real" reasons like optional compiler_speed-optimisation tradeoffs? Turbo Pascal with units is now fast enough for compile speed to be irrelevant for 90% of programmers so what else is there to push? Maybe ports to Hardware for Men like SPARC maybe? -- _______________________________________________________________________________ Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu The more things change, the more they stay insane. _______________________________________________________________________________
John G. Spragge <SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> (11/10/90)
In article <28014@usc>, ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) says: >Wait a minute: does this mean that to use Turbo Pascal 7.0, I >have no option but to run Windows? IMHO that would be a terrible >decision! There are supposed to be 30e6 to 40e6 PCs out there, >with 1e6 or so Windows machines. A market of a million units is worth going after, I think. Besides, Borland seems to be unwilling to bet their lives on the failure of MSWindows. They're in good company there. > Further, more end-users are >attracted to Windows as compared with hobbyist-programmers who >make up a good fraction of Borland's audience in buying $100-$200 >compilers. A programmer's level of professionalism is determined by the price of his/her compiler? I use Turbo, and I like to think of myself as a professional. Or maybe you meant both hobbyists and professionals; in which case, see my next point. But seriously, to write for anyone else means, by definition, writing for users. And that means working with the user interface they choose. And I suggest that, more and more, that is going to mean Windows or some other GUI. I seldom work in windows for development (yet) but I use Windows for other things. When I'm a programmer, windows is something I would like my program to talk to. When I'm being a user, windows is something I sometimes want to talk to. >Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu disclaimer: Queen's University merely supplies me with computer services, and they are responsible for neither my opinions or my ignorance. John G. Spragge