Turbo Pascal

Description

A 16 bit Pascal development system for DOS, CP/M and later MS Windows that evolved out of a Pascal compiler for the British NASCOM computer. There never materialised an OS/2 version of Turbo Pascal or the follow on product lines of Borland Pascal or Borland Delphi even though IBM actually paid Borland to ship a 32 bit version for OS/2 v2. However a number of tools, libraries and hacks were available that allow the Borland compilers to put out OS/2 compatible 16 and 32 bit code that then was linked with IBM's OS/2 linker and could be executed as OS/2 programs and tools and libraries to access the OS/2 API.

Turbo Pascal is also important as an informal standard, it created something of a revolution in the industry when it was introduced even though it was a Pascal subset rather than a full Pascal compiler like most of the competing products. But the original list price of 49.95 US$ alongside a built in IDE (a novelty at the time) and extremely fast compile times due to the single pass compilation, made the system extremely popular and a de-facto industry standard on the IBM-PC.

The fact that the code quality and execution speed of programs developed in the system was always way behind the competition that used two to four pass compilers made no difference to its intended market, most programmers that bought the system had previously been working with slow interpreted languages such as Basic, making the TP code appear fast to them. The slowness of the TP code however gave rise to the incorrect perception amongst PC coders that Pascal and related languages such as Modula 2 and Oberon were somehow slower than languages in the C family.

Author

• Borland
• Anders Hejlsberg

List of OS/2 TB, BP or Delphi compatible tools

A list of programming tools that offer full or partial compatibility to the Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal or Borland Delphi products. Note that some of the products were primarily standard (ETH, UCSD or ISO) Pascal tools that offered some compatibility features or libraries as aids to port Turbo Pascal programs to their systems while other tools were straight clones of the Borland systems, usually with added capabilities on top of the ability to generate OS/2 compatible programs.

Compilers:

• Cabot UCSD Pascal (TP & BP)
• Free Pascal (TP, BP & Delphi)
• NDP Pascal (TP & BP)
• Open Sibyl (Delphi)
• Pecan UCSD Pascal (TP)
• SpeedSoft Speed-Pascal/2 (TP & BP)
• Stony Brook Pascal+ (TP)
• TMT Pascal (TP, BP and some Delphi)
• TopSpeed Pascal (TP)
• Virtual Pascal (TP, BP & Delphi)
• WDSibyl (Delphi)