TopSpeed Pascal: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:58, 21 December 2014

Description

An ISO compliant Pascal development system with Oberon like object oriented for 16 bit OS/2, Windows and DOS code, 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.

One unusual aspect of the TopSpeed system was that you could buy variants of the development system for Modula-2, C and C++ in addition to the Pascal compiler and they shared a back end. Not only could you call C, C++ or Pascal code from the Modula compiler (and vise versa) but you could mix and match the languages in one source file without resorting to any containers. An unique feature in its time and only one or two other development systems have offered similar features since.

Although the TopSpeed Pascal compiler was never considered as good as the Modula-2 variant it received some overblown criticism for not being Turbo Pascal compatible especially considering that 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 misguided, but TS Pascal did come with a Turbo Pascal converter. 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.

Version

3.10

Prerequisites

For Windows 3.x or Win-OS/2 programming the Microsoft 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.

License

Commercial - Discontinued

Author

Niels Jensen

Publications

==Articles

A review TopSpeed Pascal by Dr. Abimbola Olowofoyeku - Note that when the review was written development of TP had already been dropped.

Links

@@ Line 4: / Line 4: @@
 One unusual aspect of the TopSpeed system was that you could buy variants of the development system for [[TopSpeed Modula-2|Modula-2]], [[TopSpeed C|C]] and [[TopSpeed C++|C++]] in addition to the Pascal compiler and they shared a back end. Not only could you call C, C++ or Pascal code from the Modula compiler (and vise versa) but you could mix and match the languages in one source file without resorting to any containers. An unique feature in its time and only one or two other development systems have offered similar features since.
-Although the TopSpeed Pascal compiler was never considered as good as the Modula-2 variant it received some overblown criticism for not being Turbo Pascal compatible especially considering that 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 misguided, but TS Pascal did come with a Turbo Pascal converter.
+Although the TopSpeed Pascal compiler was never considered as good as the Modula-2 variant it received some overblown criticism for not being Turbo Pascal compatible especially considering that 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 misguided, but TS Pascal did come with a Turbo Pascal converter. 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.
 ==Version==