Dan O'Quinn's Turbo Pasc 99 Tutorial

[+dhe]

Hi,

 Dan O'Quinn released a two diskette set called Turbo Pasc 99 Tutorial.

 Does anyone have a copy, that they would be willing to make available?

Thanks,

Dan

 

[kl99]

Turbo Pasc 99 was originally German or? I think I remember sawing a german manual somewhere in my room.

 

[apersson850]

I've translated the manual to English. It should be in some repository here.

But the language isn't uesful at all.

[blackbox]

I have the 66 page manual dated 1988 from L L Connor Enterprise (in English), with lots of official little bits of paper stuck in with corrections. It is on my list to tackle with rather a lot of the games manuals on top but I could bump it up if there is a need.

Even the tiny 11 line sample program in section D3 merits a sticky label as the original print omitted a semi colon (sigh!).

As a quick check reference, towards the back of the manual section E4 has a listing for a program called Wurm..

[kl99]

Here is some Disks that might be relevant to Turbo Pascal.

There are for sure some among it that are only about the P-Code System.

Pascal.zip

[lucien2]

14 hours ago, apersson850 said:

I've translated the manual to English. It should be in some repository here.

But the language isn't uesful at all.

I think it's a nice compiler. You can easily in corporate assembly routines.

I used it only once though, for the "Bricks" demo.

[+dhe]

I might try writing Dan O'Quinn and see what happens. ?

 

FWIW - There is a PDF of the manual on the CYC, that Mike converted, and I added fixes to, with the approval of LL Conner.

 

d.

 

[apersson850]

1 hour ago, lucien2 said:

I think it's a nice compiler. You can easily in corporate assembly routines.

There's no support for data structures (type) and no support for dynamic variables (new). These are the two essential things that makes Pascal something much better than conventional BASIC.

Hence the Turbo Pasc'99 compiler can't be considered anything but meaningless. You can just as well use a small C compiler.

The only Pascal worth using on the 99 is the UCSD Pascal, with the UCSD p-system. That, on the other hand, is equivalent in functionality to Borland's Turbo Pascal version 4.

Edited November 4, 2019 by apersson850

[+Vorticon]

1 hour ago, apersson850 said:

There's no support for data structures (type) and no support for dynamic variables (new). These are the two essential things that makes Pascal something much better than conventional BASIC.

Hence the Turbo Pasc'99 compiler can't be considered anything but meaningless. You can just as well use a small C compiler.

The only Pascal worth using on the 99 is the UCSD Pascal, with the UCSD p-system. That, on the other hand, is equivalent in functionality to Borland's Turbo Pascal version 4.

Totally agree, however we should qualify that it's still better than XB programming because it's structured and when compiled will run much faster. But then there is the most excellent XB compiler by Senior Falcon which really brushes off most of XB's speed limitations, so it will in the end boil down to a preference of language. Another thing, at last recall the compiler never really worked right, at least with the available disks we have on line. Is that correct?

[apersson850]

I don't know if it's not working properly. As soon as I realized that the type command is missing, I lost interest in it. You can write Pascal programs that don't use dynamic memory, or you get around that by having them imlicitly created and disposed on the stack instead, in local variable environment records, but using Pascal without type is like a car without any engine.

I never saw execution speed of UCSD Pascal as a big problem. With the comparatively small memory of the TI 99/4A, I considered its ability to do a lot in a small memory space more valuable. It's also pretty simple to write assembly support for Pascal, both due to how the PME works and the features in the assembler, allowing relatively easy linkage to most data structures you have.