m0p@k.cc.purdue.edu (S. Kulikowski) (05/26/88)
I have finally gotten around to installing Turbo Pascal v.4.0 on my DEC
Rainbow. Been using TP v.3.0 everyday for years in spite of its flakey
performance when the complexity of pointers get interesting... i have hopes
that they have done better with TP4. Well, it is time to put TP3 on the shelf
next to v.1.0 and v.2.0 (yes, I have been a happy user that long.) It sure is
a shame that Borland has been going technologically backwards with every
version release by building more and more IBM PC specific implementations into
their compiler. I guess that is what happens when a company gets successful
enough and a market analyst enters the design team.
I never really used their integrated editor in TP3 except to catch typos and
simple syntax oversights, so I am naturally pleased to dump all the overhead
of that IBM interfaced environment with the command-line TPC compiler.
Getting my code upgraded from TP3 to TP4 has gone along quicker than I
suspected, except for a couple small features they pushed into the CRT unit...
KEYPRESSED and READKEY.
I found out real quick that using the CRT unit, just hangs any Rainbow
program, presumably it must have an initialization section which hits some
IBM-specific hardware. I have tried several settings with the Code Blue v.1.0
IBM emulator, but nothing seems to run a TP4 .EXE file that has the CRT unit
it. Well, that is not much of a problem to me. Long ago I wrote a VT100
driver for TP2 and use it in almost all my programs. Who wants to be limited
to that impoverished ANSI monitor that the IBM guys have, when you got VT100
as a built in? My programs are up and running, looking good... except that
for some reason Borland put the keyboard functions for KEYPRESSED and READKEY
in with IBM CRT crapola. These used to be standard extensions, and my
interface designs make a lot of use of KEYPRESSED.
Anybody got a way to get the keyboard functions out of the CRT unit? I have
read through the TPUMOVER chapter and it doesn't look like you can do much
with it from command-line mode, and what they describe with the IBM interface
doesn't seem to move anything smaller an entire unit. This true?
Can someone send me Rainbow specific source code for KEYPRESSED and READKEY
to create our own units?
stan
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