6 Jul
2021
6 Jul
'21
11:58 a.m.
On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 9:37 PM Dan Stromberg <drsalists(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Supposedly even Borland's TurboPascal had better
strings than vanilla
Pascal.
and then they used only 1 byte for the string length, limiting the max
length to 255, which made it completely pointless, because the moment you
had some real world data, you were back in
manage-my-own-pointers-to-arrays-of-chars-land.
(I loved Turbo Pascal, it's the first language I used for "serious"
programming. They got a lot of things right, but strings were emphatically
not among those things).
My other gripe was that Turbo Pascal programs spend half their time on
pointer normalization (every pointer access has a preamble that makes sure
that the offset is < 16). I'd really love to understand why on earth they
decided to do it that way (I'm sure there's a reason, I just fail to see
it). It's not like anyone could do pointer arithmetic behind the compiler's
back... it slows things down, and it's probably the reason why an
equivalent Turbo C program is only half the code size. And it makes it
impossible to do clever things with segment registers (18 year old me
didn't like that).