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Turbo Debugger


Turbo Debugger (TD) was a machine-level debugger for MS-DOS executables, intended mainly for debugging Borland Turbo Pascal (TP), and later Turbo C (TC) programs, sold by Borland. This tool was a full-screen debugger displaying both TP or TC source and corresponding assembly-language instructions, with powerful capabilities for setting breakpoints, watching the execution of instructions, monitoring machine registers, etc. TD could be used for programs not generated by Borland compilers, but without showing source statements; it was by no means the only debugger available for non-Borland executables, and not a significant general-purpose debugger.

Although Borland's Turbo Pascal (TP) had useful single-stepping and conditional breakpoint facilities, the need for a more powerful debugger became apparent when TP started to be used for serious development. Initially a separate company, Turbopower, produced a debugger, T-Debug, and also their Turbo Analyst and Overlay Manager for Turbo Pascal for TP versions 1-3. Turbopower released T-Debug Plus 4.0 for TP 4.0 in 1988, but by then Borland's Turbo Debugger had been announced.

The original Turbo Debugger was a stand-alone product introduced in 1989, along with Turbo Assembler and the second version of Turbo C.

To use Turbo Debugger with source display, programs, or relevant parts of programs, had to be compiled with TP or TC with a conditional directive set which added debugging information to the compiled executable, with related source statements and corresponding machine code. The debugger would then be started (TD did not debug within the development IDE). After debugging the program would be recompiled without debugging information to reduce its size.

Later Turbo Debugger, the stand-alone Turbo Assembler (TASM), and Turbo Profiler were included with the compilers in the professional Borland Pascal and Borland C++ versions of the more restricted Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ suites for MS-DOS. After the popularity of Microsoft Windows ended the era of MS-DOS software development, Turbo Debugger was bundled with TASM for low-level software development. For many years after the end of the MS-DOS era, Borland supplied Turbo Debugger with the last console-mode Borland C++ application development environment, version 5, and with Turbo Assembler 5.0. For many years both of these products were sold even though active development stopped on them. With Borland's reorganization of their development tools as CodeGear, all references to Borland C++ and Turbo Assembler vanished from their web site. The debuggers in later products such as C++ Builder and Delphi are based on the Windows debugger introduced with the first Borland C++ and Pascal versions for Windows.


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