Lou@cup.portal.com (William Joseph Marriott) (12/04/88)
I must agree that Borland is a good company to deal with, however, there is a problem with Borland and Mac products. As David Zuhn mentioned, Turbo Pascal 1.1 does not fully meet the requirements of Inside Macintosh. In other wyas, Turbo Pascal is behind the times. Cursor keys are still not supported; The Hierarchical filing system is supported, but the program doesn't take full advantage of it in its own functions. Programmers have to hack at the program to write HyperCard XCMDs and XFCNs, an aven after the hacks, it is still a bit awkward to tweak them afterward to have proper IDs and such. MacWEEK reported that Borland was having quite a few problems with its Mac products and was thinking of dumping them. Notice, Turbo Pascal 1.1 is now more than a year old, no more updates have been made. I think Turbo is best for what _I_ bought if for originally: I had a one-drive
Lou@cup.portal.com (William Joseph Marriott) (12/04/88)
(sorry, i accidently and prematurely transmitted the first half of this post) -- I think Turbo is best for what _I_ bought if for originally: I had a one-drive Mac Plus and wanted a system to develop programs for my Pascal course in college. The program had a very easy to use "terminal" interface and was so similar to standard pascal in that regard I could get away with not using the university mainframe for my assignments. Additionally, I could work very nicely with one drive and 1 Mb of RAM... Everything I needed fit. I still recommend Turbo for people who are writing un-maclike programs, or learning Pascal. But I would not stake the company on marketing a program written in Turbo. Not saying that Borland is a bad company; it's just that I don't think they know what they're going to do about this product. The bigge impact that Turbo Pascal for the Mac may have had is on the PC version of the compiler, which was enhanced with many of the Mac features.