Rediscovering Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal 3 for CP/M comes preinstalled with the Z80-MBC2 and V20-MBC homebrew computers. Checking out the development environment made me rediscover Turbo Pascal and realize its potential for programming these computers.
Although I owned Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS in the early 1990s, I didn't use it much. Between other languages later getting my attention and Borland losing its market leadership, I eventually forgot about Turbo Pascal. Now, with the development environment handy on the Z80-MBC2 and V20-MBC, I began checking out the Turbo Pascal CP/M version I had never played with.
Being familiar with the Turbo Pascal MS-DOS IDE, which features a nice text user interface with pull-down menus and dialogs, the CP/M version seemed spartan and primitive.
But I pressed ahead, tried the various commands, edited and compiled some code, and got familiar with the keystrokes and workflow. I soon felt at ease with Turbo Pascal for CP/M. The environment is still suprisingly usable and productive, allowing fast edit-compile-run cycles with short compilation times even on the 8-bit Z80-MBC2.
I now understand why Turbo Pascal made such a sensation at the time and revolutionized development tools.
To learn the Turbo Pascal environment and language I began reading the manual, as well as books about Turbo Pascal and Pascal. The more I used Turbo Pascal and read about it, the more I enjoyed it and wanted to learn and explore.
Next thing I knew, I was down a rabbit hole.
This experimentation and reading made me realize the potential of Turbo Pascal as an ideal tool for hobby projects with these homebrew computers.
Pascal is an easy to understand, readable, and expressive language. Despite the age and design flaws, it allows to write fairly advanced code. Pascal makes practicality win over language purity.
Sitting at a sweet spot between ease of use, features, and power, Turbo Pascal is a perfect fit for CP/M as it consumes limited resources, generates moderatly small and fast executables, and can access all the features of the system. That's why it's a good environment for quickly developing small tools or programs for the Z80-MBC2 and V20-MBC.
#pascal #retrocomputing #z80mbc2 #v20mbc
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