![]() ![]() Although Surpass had been written in a rather amateur in-house Modula-2 development system called ITC STS-XP and the company spent considerable time and money re-factoring the code to be faster during the TP port, the end result was actually considerably slower than what Surpass had been and something of an embarrassment to the company as the port delayed the release of the product by a year. This was demonstrated in a somewhat emphatic fashion in 1989 when Borland ported the Surpass spreadsheet to Turbo Pascal 5.5 in order to release it as Quattro Pro. The slowness of the TP code created quite a healthy market for third party optimisers and alongside the large number of interpreted UCSD and ETH derived Pascal systems available in the early days of the PC however gave rise to the incorrect perception amongst PC coders that Pascal and related languages such as Modula-2 and Oberon were somehow slower than languages in the C family. ![]() The fact that the code quality and execution speed of programs developed in the system was always way behind the competition that used two to four pass compilers made no difference to its intended market, most programmers that bought the system had previously been working with slow interpreted languages such as Basic, FOCAL, PILOT and COMAL, making the TP code appear fast to them. It was something of a bait-and-switch product though, as features supplied as standard with other implementations were sold as add-ons by Borland, 8087 support was an extra 89.95 US$ for instance and when you added up all the available add-ons you had reached, and in some cases exceeded the price point of products like Microsoft Pascal that in addition offered features not available at all in the Turbo Pascal ecosystem. But the original list price of 49.95 US$ alongside a built in IDE (a novelty at the time) and extremely fast compile times due to the single pass compilation, made the system wildly popular and a de-facto industry standard on the IBM PC. Turbo Pascal is important as an informal standard, it created something of a revolution in the industry when it was introduced even though it was a Pascal subset rather than a full Pascal compiler like most of the competing products.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |