[mbessey]

I did mention the Turbo Pascal connection briefly, and I'll probably make a more in-depth comparison in a later post on just the IDE.

I used a fairly early version of Turbo Pascal for DOS for several years after High School. I can still remember the absolute terror of realizing you'd pressed "R" without saving first.

[wduquette]

My bad; I missed the Turbo Pascal reference.

I first heard of Turbo Pascal in a magazine called Profiles, published by Kaypro for owners of their computers; I'd recently gotten a Kaypro 4, which ran CP/M-80, my first computer of my very own, and I was pining for Apple Pascal/UCSD Pascal. I read the ad (and maybe a review?); it was $49.95, and I ordered it immediately. Nor was I disappointed.

[dumdedum123]

For a blast from the past

https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/lang/borland/pascal/3.02...

[dumdedum123]

Oh the memories! You are exactly right. I remember this as well.

[sitkack]

I never used it, are you saying you could Run the current program and it might accidentally bring your entire system down without having saved the program?

Seems like at least a two file circular buffer with autosave wouldn't take up too much space, or maybe streaming diffs into a compressed buffer (even on a 286, this shouldn't be too much trouble).

[mbessey]

Yes, that exactly. Part of what made Turbo Pascal so fast was that it kept your entire program, and the compiler, in memory.

You had an option from the main menu to "compile" or "run", which included compiling, but NOT saving your edits first. You could save first, but on a floppy-based system, that could take a while.

I want to say that behavior changed in Turbo Pascal version 2, or 3?

[cardiffspaceman]

But control-Kdsr saves your work to the device it came from and runs the program. Approximately the WordStar command set with additions for the task at hand.

[kragen]

I think that is what he is saying, though I can't remember the TP command set well enough.

Turbo Pascal wasn't written on a 286; it was written for CP/M, where I think it required 48KiB of RAM. A "fairly early version of Turbo Pascal for DOS" might have required 64KiB?

You can't really stream things onto a floppy disk (remember that early home computers and the IBM PC didn't have hard disks; they didn't become standard equipment until the late 80s). You have to write a whole sector at a time, which can take a second or two to seek the disk to the appropriate track; rotating the disk to the right sector takes a significant fraction of a second. Journaling your edits to a journal file was a feature that EDT on VAX/VMS had around that time, but there wasn't really a practical way to do that on a home computer.