Re: Turbo Pascal 1.0 trivia

Arne Frick wrote:
>> Remember the original Turbo Pascal for CP/M compiler from Borland? A
>> colleague claims it was based on p-code, but my memory tells me
>> otherwise. As far as I remember, it was the first native-code
>> compiler for Pascal at the time.


Jerry L. Wahl <jl-wahl@access.digex.net> wrote:
> Someone is probably confusing Turbo with an earlier system called
> JRT-Pascal which was marketed and sold real inexpensively a year or so
> before Turbo and was (I believe) p-code.


JRT-Pascal didn't produce p-code. Remember that p-code was more or
less standardised, the idea being that once compiled, a p-code Pascal
program should be runnable on any system having a p-code interpreter,
or running p-code as machine code (like Western Digital's "The Pascal
Micro Engine" did). BTW, Java is based on the same paradigm today:
j-code - portable machine code.


JRT did produce its own variety of pseudo-code, which was not p-code
compatible at all.


> My perception is that Turbo probably wiped them out marketing wise
> as JRT had a number of deficiencies that let to many saying it wasn't
> really even pascal.


JRT-Pascal did indeed have a lot of non-standard "extensions", plus
a number of pieces in Standard Pascal missing.


> I recall it being released to some archive as freeware a few years
> later. If you need more specifics I could probably find ad's in old
> mags.


Those ads even told the users it was OK to give away copies of
JRT-Pascal, including the documentation, for free to other people.
Thus it was no wonder it appeared as freeware soon after JRT folded.
When JRT had gone out of business, JRT-Pascal briefly reappeared
commercially, this time under the name "Nevada Pascal" and sold by
Ellis Computing (another company which has vanished).


> Turbo was always a compiler.


And so was JRT, even though it compiled to pseudo-code, and deviated
too much from real Pascal.


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