Turbo Pascal alternatives

[MarkHaysHarris777]

(02-23-2015 12:53 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  

(02-22-2015 10:45 PM)MarkHaysHarris777 Wrote:  Pascal and BASIC were great back in the day, but in a modern world Python has them both beat hands down...
marcus

Ahhh - you are assuming I am living in the modern world. Since I am mainly retired, I live most of my programming time in the "back in the day". It's more fun. My main system to play with is the Ominibook 430 notebook. Much more fun than doing stuff on a modern PC. Now days, I really don't have any reason to learn new languages.

No problema, really; I totally understand. I do quite a bit of 'back in the day' myself. I still have two towers that boot into real DOS 6.1 (I've got both MSDOS, and PCDOS) and from there I run GWBASIC, QBASIC, MIX C, and DEBUG. I have Turbo Pascal, too, but don't use it. At any rate, I do quite a bit of 8086 machine programming, and lots of DOC C and BASIC. Most of my stuff has been ported over to my gnu/linux boxes so I can run in DOSBox. Interesting stuff, that DOSBox will let you run 'real' MSDOS images.

(02-23-2015 12:53 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  Now to really regress - other than Turbo Pascal, my favorite is Tiny Pascal. Compiler and Z-80 translator is written in Basic, based on the three part series in Byte magazine. It's integer only. I have translated it to run in the original MSDOS Basica and then I run final Z-80 code in a TRS-80 emulator. Great fun. My ultimate goal is to translate it to Sharp PC-1600 basic and have an integer Pascal compiler running on a handheld.

I have the original PC-1 (was never branded that way, but that's what we all called it) made by SHarp for Radio Shack back in 1980. Radio Shack called it the TRS-80 Pocket Computer; programmed in BASIC (sort-of) had like 1492 steps and shared program memory with variables (one working up, the other working down). Mine is starting to show signs of LCD deterioration in the 24 character alpha numeric display, but otherwise still looks pretty good, powers up, and runs! Mine takes (4) 675 hearing aid batts (I'll see if I can power it up tomorrow, then I'll post a pic). That silly thing is 35 years old! ... oh, man. By the way, this is what's wrong with buying vintage calcs (like the Sharp, or the HP15c) because the LCDs from that era were not designed for the long haul... and are starting to go dark. Theoretically, the electronics might last 'forever,' but the LCD won't.

Cheers,
marcus