engelke@uf-csv.UUCP (charles engelke [fac]) (10/08/84)
I've used Turbo Pascal on both IBM PCs and Apples, and
I can verify that it is an excellent product. It is fast, a
true compiler, and close to standard Pascal. I have used
several Pascal compilers and interpreters on the PC (UCSD,
Microsoft, Waterloo and Turbo), and Turbo is the best for
almost every purpose.
The package includes one of the best program editors around.
Whenever I need a general editor, I load Turbo to use it. The
editor can be configured to use whatever editing keys you like
for the 45 editor commands, a feature I now find essential (I use
too many editors on too many machines to keep track of them all).
The only serious deviation from standard Pascal (to my mind)
is Turbo's I/O. No file windows are available (this is supposed
to be a space saving feature), and input suffers from this. For
instance, integers and reals in an input file must be followed by
blanks or an error occurs.
The other deviations from the standard are really extensions,
and they are very useful. For example, the MS-DOS version for
8088 and 8086 machines has a built in procedure to call interrupts.
All you have to do is set up a record representing the machine's
registers and send it to the interrupt procedure. It performs the
interrupt and then returns the altered registers back to the calling
procedure. If you want to do anything at all fancy with your machine
this is a great feature. Turbo also provides two predeclared arrays,
MemArray and PortArray, that allow a Pascal program direct access
to the PC's memory and ports. Finally, a collection of screen-
manipulation routines is also included.
The MS-DOS version of Turbo (as opposed to the CP/M version)
allows very easy linking of Pascal programs and assembler routines,
although the special features mentioned above make it almost
unnecessary to ever do that.
Finally, some speed information. When a program is in the
editor's workspace, and the compilation is being sent to memory
rather than disk (this is the default), Turbo Pascal compiles about
50 lines of Pascal code per second. I've checked this with a lot
of long programs, each with very few comments. A heavily commented
program compiles even faster. A friend of mine has run a few bench-
marks on Pascal compilers, and Turbo-compiled programs RUN faster
than programs compiled by UCSD or Microsoft. (Microsoft-compiled
programs with error-checking disabled run slightly faster than
Turbo-compiled programs.)
Charles Engelke
CIS Department
University of Florida
By the way, you can get a version of Turbo with 8087 support, too.
It runs some of my programs 6 times faster than standard Turbo..