Hacker Remix

Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)

31 points by leonry 9 months ago | 5 comments

relistan 9 months ago

The editor was very basic, but surprisingly good. I used it this year on CP/M on my RC2014. The whole IDE was pretty great, given that it also included a fast compiler.

I don't think the intent of this whole thing is to say that there is no point in modern improvements. But it _is_ good to have some reference on how much we used to get done with so little. Those several decades of complexity growth are buying us some stuff, but maybe not as much as we think.

miohtama 9 months ago

What these legacy comparisons often miss: for human use, you also need documentation (and sometimes even things like error messages). This was not part of the binary, but delivered on paper. The manuals were much larger than the binary.

pjmlp 9 months ago

By the time of the Turbo Vision IDE (TP 6), Turbo Pascal had online help, it was three floppies full installation.

akira2501 9 months ago

Turbo Pascal 3 had compiler error message strings. Half of the manual was reference material and things like ASCII tables. Without Internet having a lot of extraneous material in manuals was not uncommon.

These older compilers also did nearly direct translation of your code into assembly, barely did any optimization, and made heavy use of the stack to smooth everything out. Pascal, in particular, due to it's ability to nest procedures and native set types generated some pretty suboptimal code.

It's why we had things like register variables and decent inline assembly primitives.

WesolyKubeczek 9 months ago

When they compare the binary size to, say, jQuery, jQuery’s documentation is not included either.

9 months ago