Turbo Pascal
| Developer(s) | Anders Hejlsberg while working at Borland |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1983 |
| Operating system |
CP/M, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Macintosh |
| Platform | 8080/Z80, 8085, x86 |
| Type | Integrated development environment |
Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership. For versions 6 and 7 (last), both a lower-priced Turbo Pascal and more expensive Borland Pascal were produced; Borland Pascal was more oriented towards professional software development, with more libraries and standard library source code. The name Borland Pascal is also used more generically for Borland's dialect of the Pascal programming language, significantly different from Standard Pascal.
Borland has released three old versions of Turbo Pascal free of charge because of their historical interest: the original Turbo Pascal (now known as 1.0), and versions 3.02 and 5.5 for DOS.
Philippe Kahn first saw an opportunity for Borland, his newly formed software company, in the field of programming tools. Historically, the vast majority of programmers saw their workflow in terms of the edit/compile/link cycle, with separate tools dedicated to each task. Programmers wrote source code using a text editor; the source code was then compiled into object code (often requiring multiple passes), and a linker combined object code with runtime libraries to produce an executable program.
In the early IBM PC market (1981–83) the major programming tool vendors all made compilers that worked in a similar fashion. For example, the Microsoft Pascal system consisted of two compiler passes and a final linking pass (which could take minutes on systems with only floppy disks for secondary storage, although programs were very much smaller than they are today). This process was less resource-intensive than the later integrated development environment (IDE). Vendors of software development tools aimed their products at professional developers, and the price for these basic tools plus ancillary tools like profilers ran into the hundreds of dollars.
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