W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Keith Petersen) (05/27/85)
Borland has come out with version 3.0 of Turbo Pascal. From the
ads, all of the improvements seem to be MSDOS. What
improvements are there in the CPM80 versions and are they worth
spending the money for an update?
Below is a file I recently received on my RCPM.
--Keith Petersen
Arpa: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARPA
uucp: ...!{decvax,unc,hao,cbosgd,seismo,aplvax,uci}!brl-bmd!w8sdz
uucp: ...!{ihnp4!cbosgd,cmcl2!esquire}!brl-bmd!w8sdz
--cut here--TURBO3.TXT--cut here--
From: PHILIP BURNS
(Message from the SMUG BBS, Formerly SUGI/SIG, Rockville)
I received my copy of Turbo 3.0 today. I have only worked with it
for a few hours, but my initial impressions are extremely
positive:
(1) All the bugs I encountered in release 2.0
have been fixed.
(2) The compiler is AT LEAST twice as fast as
before. For example, a 10000+ line program
I have which used to take 9+ minutes to
compile now compiles in less than four minutes.
(3) The generated code is substantially smaller --
as much as 35% for some of my programs --
and runs considerably faster.
(4) The editor appears to run much faster --
nearly instantaneous screen updates, etc.
(5) The PC/DOS version (which I am using) includes
standard procedures for directory access and
manipulation. In addition, file names may now
contain drive/subdirectory information:
a file name like 'C:\mydirec\myfile.dat' is now legal.
(6) The installation program allows you to define
the drive/directory for the message file.
No more having to have multiple copies strewn
all over your disks!
(7) The are a number of system-interface
procedures for getting command line arguments,
defining a path for TURBO overlays, etc.
(8) There are a number of advanced graphics
functions -- for generating circles,
fill patterns, etc. -- as well a very nice
implementation of Turtle graphics.
(9) Full I/O redirection on standard files is
provided. The run-time package also uses
standard MS DOS file handles.
NOTE: THIS MEANS THAT TURBO 3.0 WILL ONLY RUN
UNDER MSDOS/PCDOS RELEASE 2.0 OR LATER!
(10) You can change buffer sizes for files.
(11) You can open a file for append.
(12) Text I/O is considerably faster -- especially
with larger buffer sizes -- and a number of new
procedures are available for manipulating text files.
(13) External assembler procedures appear to work
correctly now.
(14) The BCD version provides nice editing facilities
for numbers, which should ease writing
business-oriented programs.
On the negative side, there are a few things still missing:
(1) Still no integer type > 16 bits.
(2) Still no out-of-block GOTOs. (This hinders writing
parsers using recursive descent.)
(3) The 8087 version still only supports the
64-bit real -- no 32 bit reals, no 80 bit reals,
no long integers, etc.
(4) There are quite a few errors in the published
documentation. Hence, you MUST READ CAREFULLY the
README file enclosed on the distribution disk.
One word of caution about Turbo 3.0 -- in fixing the EOLN and
related functions, Borland changed their function a little when
applied to Kbd. If you apply EOLN to KBD, you'll find things
get a little behind -- there's a one-character delay. This means
that if you wrote your own procs to process/edit input lines,
and you used EOLN(Kbd), then THEY WON'T WORK ANYMORE. The easiest
fix is to check for a carriage return character and not bother
with the EOLN -- not exactly standard Pascal, but what the heck,
who cares anyway.jchapman@watcgl.UUCP (john chapman) (07/26/85)
The ads for turbo pascal 3.0 seem to imply that they only have tree structured directory support for the PC-DOS version and not the generic MSDOS version. I don't see why it would be specific to PC-DOS, it shouldn't depend on the hardware as far as I can see. Can anyone out there state just what the support in the generic 3.0 is? An aside: I tried 8queens and recursive and iterative versions of quicksort on both Terbo 2.0 and MS-Pascal The latter was much faster in execution despite the figures they give for their benchmarks execution speed. Only significant difference I could see was their becnhmark employed significant floating point work and mine didn't. Perhaps they have a faster float package (and less accurate?) than MS-Pascal? Thanks in advance for any help. -- John Chapman ...!watmath!watcgl!jchapman Disclaimer : These are not the opinions of anyone but me and they may not even be mine.