Turbo Pascal for Amiga?

[Pyromania]

Turbo Pascal was open source a while ago. Is this something that should be port to Amiga? The more dev tools the better right? I ran it with DosBox and it looked better than I expected.

[Samurai_Crow]

FreePascal has already been ported. It's a little better anyway. I'll see if I can get a link.

https://blog.alb42.de/fpc-amigaaros-m68k/ has links to 68k version. Check the menus for the AROS x86, MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.1 versions.

[idrougge]

There is already Hispeed Pascal from HiSoft. It is Turbo Pascal compatible.

[Pyromania]

Those are missing that lovely DOS interface.

[Samurai_Crow]

Is there even a 68k version of Turbo Pascal? At least Free Pascal is comparable to an early version of Delphi, the object oriented successor to Turbo Pascal.

[Pyromania]

I believe Turbo Pascal is x86 code only.

[Samurai_Crow]

Free Pascal has been ported to AROS x86 already for ABI0 and ABI1. It should be sufficient.

[Pyromania]

How hard is it to learn Pascal programming? I heard it’s one on of the easer ones to learn.

[Samurai_Crow]

It's easier than C but Object Pascal is more like C++. Turbo and HiSoft are regular Pascal but Free Pascal is Object Pascal. Look at ALB's past Blog posts to learn about his Free Pascal ports.

[Pyromania]

Any great Amiga Apps or games made with Pascal?

[Samurai_Crow]

Apps yes. Games no. ALB has ported several GUI-based apps and posted about it to his blog. There's an Open Street Maps port and others.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

Those are missing that lovely DOS interface.

MS-DOS, you mean? If you want a 70s computer experience, why are you on an Amiga forum?

[Pyromania]

Originally Posted by idrougge

MS-DOS, you mean? If you want a 70s computer experience, why are you on an Amiga forum?

I was just kidding. While I did buy the ATonce card for my A500 way back in the late 1980s I immediately regretted my purchase since I was not a fan of MS-DOS applications after being spoiled by Amiga. I learned that fact once I was able to install MS-DOS on my Amiga 500 ATonce card. Still, it was an interesting hybrid machine. I would eventually replace the PC Card for an 50Mhz 68030 Accelerator.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

How hard is it to learn Pascal programming? I heard it’s one on of the easer ones to learn.

It was the first language I learned back in school. It was quite easy to follow, jumping to C from it the next year was actually pretty uneventful.

[Jpor]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

How hard is it to learn Pascal programming? I heard it’s one on of the easer ones to learn.

It was taught in U.K colleges back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I started with BASIC on a VIC-20 then on a BBC Micro at High school. When I went to college we were taught PASCAL due to the logical nature and use of procedures. Came in handy for me when I later went into UNIX and LINUX Shell scripting.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

I was just kidding.

To be fair, back in the day, that Turbo Pascal editor was pretty good.

I did a lot of PC programming in that. (and FoxBase)
It was better than USCD Pascal on the C64! (Yes, I used that for programming classes for a bit, before I got my Amiga. ;-)

That said, it was showing its age as GUIs started really coming into their own. ;-)

[deladrevoc]

I did my A Level computer studies project on an 1MB expanded A500 using Turbo Pascal and software based IBM emulator. It took 30 mins to compile 1000 lines of code - a real pain, as I often found out I'd made more than one mistake before compiling!

If only I could have afforded the KCS Power PC board back in the day

I sat in front of a colour TV for three days solid to finish coding a database program by the deadline. It was still fun despite the sleep deprivation and sore throat which I'm convinced was down to radiation from the TV....

[idrougge]

In any case someone wonders why Pascal was so big on PCs and not on the Amiga, it’s partly because Turbo Pascal was an excellent development environment on the PC, but also because Modula-2, which was Niklaus Wirth’s successor language to Pascal, was much more established on the Amiga.

If you’ve ever used MuchMore or TurboText, you’ve used one Modula-2 program on the Amiga.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by idrougge

In any case someone wonders why Pascal was so big on PCs and not on the Amiga, it’s partly because Turbo Pascal was an excellent development environment on the PC, but also because Modula-2, which was Niklaus Wirth’s successor language to Pascal, was much more established on the Amiga.

If you’ve ever used MuchMore or TurboText, you’ve used one Modula-2 program on the Amiga.

What about Oberon? Wasn't it Modula's successor?

[idrougge]

Yes, and MuchMore was rewritten in Oberon, AFAIK.

However, Oberon was designed to be a simpler, more restrained language than Modula-2, so it might not have appealed to seasoned Modula programmers. I don’t know if the tooling was up to par, either.