So who are you going to believe?

Nicholas Wirth or 20 year old Usenet gossip? I mean really...

Turbo Pascal was a fun language/package. I seem to recall that it came on a single floppy with room to spare. It could do fun things with VGA colors and curses style windows. It was specified as the required language for a program I had to write for a customer who had to convert the output of some kind of 20 bit processor (probably an in-house bit slice design). TP only had 16 bit signed integers so I ended up converting values by bit shifting 16 bits and multiplying by a real to get a final result. It was interesting but I was hardly impressed with the language. Outside of playing though, that was all I really did with it, so I don't have a real informed opinion.

In that time frame, I used mostly PLM and assembler. When I moved into unix systems, C was sort of a natural progression. When I went into OS/2 and Windows world, C/C++ compilers were readily available and I knew the language so I used them. I still like C and C++ for driver work and low level services and such. I don't do much high level web or data base stuff any more.

I still maintain that most languages are useful if used properly. I will probably never be able to use english to win this arguement though...

Post #287,483 by hnick 6/21/07 7:26:29 AM Reply	So who are you going to believe? Nicholas Wirth or 20 year old Usenet gossip? I mean really... Turbo Pascal was a fun language/package. I seem to recall that it came on a single floppy with room to spare. It could do fun things with VGA colors and curses style windows. It was specified as the required language for a program I had to write for a customer who had to convert the output of some kind of 20 bit processor (probably an in-house bit slice design). TP only had 16 bit signed integers so I ended up converting values by bit shifting 16 bits and multiplying by a real to get a final result. It was interesting but I was hardly impressed with the language. Outside of playing though, that was all I really did with it, so I don't have a real informed opinion. In that time frame, I used mostly PLM and assembler. When I moved into unix systems, C was sort of a natural progression. When I went into OS/2 and Windows world, C/C++ compilers were readily available and I knew the language so I used them. I still like C and C++ for driver work and low level services and such. I don't do much high level web or data base stuff any more. I still maintain that most languages are useful if used properly. I will probably never be able to use english to win this arguement though...
Post #287,492 by CRConrad 6/21/07 9:53:50 AM Reply	Nah, you probably won't: "Argument". HTH! :-)
Post #287,505 by Andrew Grygus 6/21/07 10:59:41 AM Reply	Early versions had only 16-bit integers . . . . . and that was a bit of a problem. Later versions added the 32-bit LONGINT data type which made usability much better. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]

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