TopSpeed Pascal
An ISO compliant Pascal development system for 16-bit OS/2, Windows and DOS code with object-oriented extensions that are a mix of the O-O extensions from Borland Pascal and those from Oberon, can be run natively or by cross compiling from DOS. System now owned by Soft Velocity who use it as a utility development system for their Clarion database product and an OS/2 compatible product is no longer being offered. Originally a development of the TopSpeed Modula-2 compiler and shares the same environment and back-end.
Although the TopSpeed Pascal compiler was by many not considered to be as good as the Modula-2 variant it received some largely undeserved criticism for sundry aspects of the system, not the least for not being Turbo Pascal compatible, especially considering that TopSpeed head honcho Niels Jensen was the founder of Borland. That was actually by design as Jensen thought the Object Pascal extensions developed by Apple and later taken on by Borland were slightly misguided, but TS Pascal did come with a Turbo Pascal converter and later versions of the toolkit came with a "Turbo Pascal Mode" that allowed the system to compile TP code with fairly little changes. The actual code produced by TopSpeed was considerably better than what was put out by Turbo Pascal but then again the latter was not exactly known for producing fast or good code, and the library supplied with TS Pascal was considered by many to be the best available and was certainly the most extensive one for a PC Pascal in the early 90s.
The TopSpeed development environment
The Pascal compiler could also be used to develop software for the Psion series 3 in a roundabout way if used with the PSION s3 SDK, as the environment allowed you to develop Pascal code with C code, headers and libraries you could get functional s3 apps by linking the Pascal code with the required C headers/libs and then compiling everything with the PSION SDK, in rare cases needing a little bit of glue C code.
Version
- 3.10
Prerequisites
- For Windows 3.x or Win-OS/2 programming the TopSpeed TechKit is required, but the tools from it integrate into the TopSpeed environment.
- Although you can develop OS/2 Presentation Manager applications without the OS/2 SDK, it is highly recommended that you use it since the PM support of TopSpeed Pascal is rather weak in the parts where tools from the SDK already existed.
- DOS 3.0 or later and/or OS/2 1.3 or later.
License
- Commercial
- Author: Jensen and Partners International / Clarion
Links
- Articles
- A review TopSpeed Pascal by Dr. Abimbola Olowofoyeku - Note that when the review was written development of TP had already been dropped.
- Various fixes and workarounds for the 3.10 version of the compiler
