Do you know if there's a manual kicking around somewhere for tp7? I have deinifitely forgotten everything, I can't even declare a 2d string
array.. If I recall right, you can open files with just file open... but even that's hazy..
On 02-10-20 04:58, bcw142 wrote to Spectre <=-
I take it you are referring to the last version of Turbo Pascal which
was 7.0 (1993) and not released like most of the older ones. Like all
the later Turbo Pascal versions it is written in itself. There are
books on that, but what's wrong with Free Pascal and it's manuals and information?
Do you know if there's a manual kicking around somewhere for tp7? I have
deinifitely forgotten everything, I can't even declare a 2d string
array.. If I recall right, you can open files with just file open... but even that's hazy..
I take it you are referring to the last version of Turbo Pascal which
was 7.0 (1993) and not released like most of the older ones. Like
all the later Turbo Pascal versions it is written in itself. There
are books on that, but what's wrong with Free Pascal and it's
manuals and information?
On 02-10-20 18:25, Black Panther wrote to Spectre <=-
deinifitely forgotten everything, I can't even declare a 2d string
strings : Array[1..10,1..10] of string
array.. If I recall right, you can open files with just file open... but even that's hazy..
assign(f,'filename.dat');
reset(f);
Now, keep in mind, I didn't use Turbo Pascal. I was using FreePascal
with Lazarus, so it may be different. :)
assign(f,'filename.dat');
reset(f);
That looks familiar from my TP days.
After a quick internet search, I found a site where you can download the PDF of the manual.
Good question. FreePascal looks nice, and there's excellent documentation. And being able to compile natively to multiple platforms
is a bonus too.
On 02-10-20 21:24, Black Panther wrote to Vk3jed <=-
What keeps getting me in trouble with C, is being accustomed to:
a:=1;
if a=1
in pascal...
vs:
int a=1;
if (a==1)
in C
I'm still used to using the single =. I'll get it yet, even if it takes
a few more smacks in the head. :)
On 02-11-20 00:48, Phoobar wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Good question. FreePascal looks nice, and there's excellent documentation. And being able to compile natively to multiple platforms
is a bonus too.
Not being a programmer...what's the difference between *Pascal &
Python? Please don't flame me...but what about Visual Basic or whatever
MS calls it now?
Not being a programmer...what's the difference between *Pascal & Python? Please don't flame me...but what about Visual Basic or whatever MS calls it now?
Not being a programmer...what's the difference between *Pascal & Python? Please don't flame me...
but what about Visual Basic or whatever MS calls
it now?
Not being a programmer...what's the difference between *Pascal & Python?
They're all quite different. I've never used Python, other than running other peoples' code, and haven't used VB either. Pascal these days is cross platform, as is Python, but VB is Windows specific.
-The syntax is different.
-Pascal is a structured pr.language ,while python is not.
- Pascal uses a compiler, but python uses an interpreter. Python is a script language.
- Python has way bigger support than pascal has.
Pascal is much older. I mentioned this the other day in a post
Python has picked up significant favor recently as a
teaching vehicle, and is now the first language taught
in a number of top CS programs (e.g., MIT's; personally
I think this is a mistake, privately I suspect some of
the faculty do as well). This was a position previously
occupied by Pascal, but the older language has generally
fallen out of favor.
I haven't looked at python much, but at glance to me, it looks like an alien language by comparison. But then I'm not much of a programmer either :)
Same thing here. Run Python apps all day long & with many BBS software written in *Pascal...have exposure to that. VB has been around for decades. No wonder Python/*Pascal are used more.
with & could wrap my mind around...but JS...that make me feel like
Homer Simpsons's twin brother...if he had one. ;)
Remember... BASIC was written for non-programmers to write programs.
with & could wrap my mind around...but JS...that make me feel like Homer Simpsons's twin brother...if he had one. ;)Maybe he was part of triplets? :)
Was in college in the mid-80's & working at a work-study job in the computer lab. Remember the students going through reams of paper (with
me changing ribbons & making sure the paper didn't run out). Right before mid-terms/finals...felt sorry for them. Some were crying because they couldn't figure out how to get their programs to compile. Most of them were business/science majors who needed to learn a computer language
more powerful than BASIC.
Sounds like the same BS with Fortran/Cobol back in the day. Still need programmers for these "dinosaurs"...but they aren't quite as pretty as
the new girl on the block. They also may not be used as much as they
used to...but when the ones who know them are no longer around...Python isn't be the girl she is now.
On 02-11-20 12:31, Phoobar wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Same thing here. Run Python apps all day long & with many BBS software written in *Pascal...have exposure to that. VB has been around for decades. No wonder Python/*Pascal are used more.
Oh yikes. That's a huge bummer.... I'm mildly surprised the engineering/science types didn't opt for Fortran over Pascal,
but hey....
It's surprising how much Fortran and COBOL is still out
there. But, as a friend of mine likes to say about Fortran,
"the math hasn't changed." There's also the issue of
having to revalidate 50 years worth of results if the
code is rewritten in a "modern" language.
Python really has a following these days, and is said to be a great language to get started on these days, but I can't confirm this.
Python really has a following these days, and is said to be a great language to get started on these days, but I can't confirm this.
Even with all 3 of those heads...it does make 1.5 arses when put
together. (Had to make a bald joke.)
On 02-11-20 20:46, Phoobar wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Python really has a following these days, and is said to be a great language to get started on these days, but I can't confirm this.
When I worked as a teacher's aide...the big programming language they
are using with kids is Scratch. MIT even uses it for the 1st
programming class for the 1st week.
Tried it & didn't give me control like I had with BASIC. It's almost
like building a comic strip.
On 02-11-20 21:29, ryan wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Python really has a following these days, and is said to be a great language to get started on these days, but I can't confirm this.
It's excellent for many people for a few reasons:
1. It's interpreted. No goofy build environment stuff.
2. It's rather simple and does much of the heavy lifting for you, so
that you can focus on human readable code (and is more walk-up approachable for non-devs).
3. It handles "data science" well (at least v3.4 does) and as such is
used heavily by that community
On 02-12-20 15:45, tenser wrote to Phoobar <=-
Oh yikes. That's a huge bummer.... I'm mildly surprised the engineering/science types didn't opt for Fortran over Pascal,
but hey....
It's surprising how much Fortran and COBOL is still out
there. But, as a friend of mine likes to say about Fortran,
"the math hasn't changed." There's also the issue of
having to revalidate 50 years worth of results if the
code is rewritten in a "modern" language.
Even with all 3 of those heads...it does make 1.5 arses when put together. (Had to make a bald joke.)Jake the Peg with an extra gluteus maximus.. :)
are using with kids is Scratch. MIT even uses it for the 1st programming class for the 1st week.Yes, that's popular with kids. Some kids are quite skilled in making games with Scratch.
Pascal was my strongest language, though I knew some BASIC and some assemply on a handful of processors - 8080, 8086, Z80, 6809 to name a
few. I remember the 6809 being particularly nice to write assembler
Python really has a following these days, and is said to be a great language to get started on these days, but I can't confirm this.
Python really has a following these days, and is said to be a great language to get started on these days, but I can't confirm this.
When I worked as a teacher's aide...the big programming language they are using with kids is Scratch. MIT even uses it for the 1st programming
class for the 1st week.
I did learn some Fortran at uni, and for engineering type problems, it
was a good language, with its huge range of built in numeric types and mathematical functions - The only language I've encountered that has a built in complex number type - in all others, I've had to define a
complex type.
When I worked as a teacher's aide...the big programming language they are using with kids is Scratch. MIT even uses it for the 1st programming
Eh? Maybe I'm not parsing this right: do you mean they use Scratch
in the intro programming class? No, I'm pretty sure they don't: they
It's really a shame that Logo didn't take off and displace BASIC as a "first" language on early PCs. Once you strip away the stupid
turtle, it's actually a decent language (though working with strings
is a bit painful).
It's interesting that Python with SciPy and NumPy running under the
PyPy jit are starting to displace some of the older languages like
Matlab and R. I wonder what the long-term effect will be on Fortran.
When I worked as a teacher's aide...the big programming language are using with kids is Scratch. MIT even uses it for the 1st programming
Eh? Maybe I'm not parsing this right: do you mean they use Scratch in the intro programming class? No, I'm pretty sure they don't: they
The yocal highscool here uses it... I don't know about any tertiary stuff though.
It's really a shame that Logo didn't take off and displace BASIC as a "first" language on early PCs. Once you strip away the stupid turtle, it's actually a decent language (though working with strings is a bit painful).
Well back in those days, BASIC was there at instant on... it was pretty ubiquitous. I think our biggest problem with Logo was no documentation. The cheesy high school was running copies of the software with no manuals.. The text didn't cover much save making pretty pictures so that was all we knew to do with it.
Vk3jed wrote to tenser <=-
I did learn some Fortran at uni, and for engineering type problems, it
was a good language, with its huge range of built in numeric types and mathematical functions - The only language I've encountered that has a built in complex number type - in all others, I've had to define a
complex type.
tenser wrote to Vk3jed <=-
If you're going to start out with a dynamically typed language,
then make it a member of the Lisp family; my kids are learning
Racket (https://racket-lang.org) for example.
I can't believe LISP is still around - I did 2 weeks of LISP in a CS class, and when I was collecting compilers and environments back in the 80s and early 90s, remember running into a couple of LISP interpreters.
It was the way to go in engineering for quite some time; FORTRAN was my first real language, followed by PASCAL and then C. Still have a soft
spot for old-school FORTRAN 66 - hence my handle.
On 02-12-20 03:43, Phoobar wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Yes, that's popular with kids. Some kids are quite skilled in making games with Scratch.
Saw a lot of that happening. I tried it...looked a lot like I did last night after work...as I felt like I was crawling out of the store on
all fours. ;)
Tried music when I was in high school since that was the only set of classes I could take which allowed a creative outlet. Found out that I
was a hell of a board operator & playing with the tech...so never tried
to be that creative with programming or music.
On 02-13-20 02:38, tenser wrote to Vk3jed <=-
I actually disagree with this. Python is an _easy_ language to
get started with, because it appears to be very simple at first
glance, and the "batteries included" library lets you do lots of
stuff with it right out of the gate.
But it's actually not a particularly _good_ language and it's
frankly difficult to use correctly for non-trivial programs. The
symbol scoping and typing are a mess.
If you're going to start out with a dynamically typed language,
then make it a member of the Lisp family; my kids are learning
Racket (https://racket-lang.org) for example. If you're going
to start out with a statically typed language, then something
like Go might be better. If you're serious about computer science,
then learn a language like Haskell or Standard ML.
On 02-13-20 02:56, tenser wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Indeed. Common Lisp has a complex type, and a few newer or specialty domain languages....
A good friend of mine is an electrical engineering professor at
Berkeley and she's all about the Matlab. I never really understood
that one, but I guess in that world it's actually a really good choice...it's got a vaguely Fortran-like syntax, but all these bells
and whistles to do some fairly advanced math, visualize the results,
etc. If you want to punch in a few numbers and play with them interactively then it's a decent choice. If you want to crunch
over a big dataset, not so much. I mean, it's hard to beat
Mathematica for interactive use, but network effects and all of that.
I've used Octave to compute the coefficients for a software FIR
low-pass filter for demodulating digital data in a ham radio
application, but you can do the same thing in Mathematica.
It's interesting that Python with SciPy and NumPy running under the
PyPy jit are starting to displace some of the older languages like
Matlab and R. I wonder what the long-term effect will be on Fortran.
On 02-12-20 09:33, poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Vk3jed <=-
It was the way to go in engineering for quite some time; FORTRAN was my first real language, followed by PASCAL and then C. Still have a soft
spot for old-school FORTRAN 66 - hence my handle.
If you're going to start out with a dynamically typed language,
then make it a member of the Lisp family; my kids are learning
Racket (https://racket-lang.org) for example. If you're going
to start out with a statically typed language, then something
like Go might be better. If you're serious about computer science, then learn a language like Haskell or Standard ML.
How much are these used in the wild? Most of them I haven't heard of -
I know Lisp has been around for ages, and Go vaguely rings a bell, but that's about t.
From memory, we were using Fortran 77. And yes, I like your handle. :)
BASIC in ROM of the early microcomputers made it an easy default. It didn't matter that it sucked and there were better things out there;
you had BASIC and not the other thing that was better.
I know it gets a bad rap, and you can be might sloppy with it, but I
don't think at the end of the day its really all that bad. I can still pop out bits and pieces in Applesoft, where I'm still struggling to remember pascal.
On 02-13-20 10:44, tenser wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Racket is very popular in education, and "Hacker News" (the site)
was written in a language that was, itself, written in an early
dialect. I'm not sure what the current status of that is.
Go is insanely popular, and a lot of stuff is now in Go. Kubernetes,
for example, is written in Go. A lot of web sites are using it as
a backend language. My `ginko` binkp implementation is in Go.
Haskell and Standard ML are a bit more academic, but real systems
have been built in both. Haskell in particular has been the focus
of a lot of academic effort in the fields of compilers, language
theory, etc. In terms of industry use, it's used a lot in finance
and in hardware design (where it's used as a specification language
that's a lot less error prone than e.g. VHDL or Verilog).
You may not realize it, but if you've searched for an airline ticket
any time in the last ten or so years, you've probably used a Lisp
program (though indirectly): the most common flight search and pricing engine is a very complex Common Lisp program called QPX, though to
call it a Lisp program is a little generous.
On 02-13-20 10:47, tenser wrote to Vk3jed <=-
On 13 Feb 2020 at 08:06a, Vk3jed pondered and said...
From memory, we were using Fortran 77. And yes, I like your handle. :)
Fortran 77 was really where Fortran started getting
reasonable. A lot of people don't know it, but Fortran
77's string and character handling abilities were
actually better than C's. Most everyone implemented the
VAX extensions and that was actually a very nice
language (yay tab instead of counting spaces to start
a line).
Fortran 77 was really where Fortran started getting
reasonable. A lot of people don't know it, but Fortran
77's string and character handling abilities were
actually better than C's. Most everyone implemented the
I can't remember, though I also didn't do anything particularly clever with strings in Fortran. As I said, I remember liking the language overall, it seemed suited to what I might want to do with it at the
time. :)
VAX extensions and that was actually a very nice
language (yay tab instead of counting spaces to start
a line).
Yep I recall that quirk. :)
Eh? Maybe I'm not parsing this right: do you mean they use Scratch
in the intro programming class? No, I'm pretty sure they don't: they
use Python. Which is frankly a shame; they used to use Scheme.
It's really a shame that Logo didn't take off and displace BASIC as
a "first" language on early PCs. Once you strip away the stupid
turtle, it's actually a decent language (though working with strings
is a bit painful).
On 02-13-20 14:44, tenser wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Yeah. Great for scientific computing. IBM tried to
push PL/I for everything else, but the scientists and
engineers weren't having it. Ironically, PL/1 became
the implementation language for Multics due to Doug
McIlroy's influence; Doug went on to be department
head of area 1127 at Bell Labs, which did Unix and C.
Both were, in many ways, reactions to Multics and PL/1
respectively. Incidentally, Doug also invented the
notion of the pipe (as in Unix pipes).
Cool. Fortran was actually a competent systems language
under VMS; a friend of mine implemented much of Jnet (a
BITNET/RSCS implementation) in Fortran. I mentioned it
in passing when I talked about languages over on the Fat
Dragon (http://fat-dragon.org/post/languages/), but to
call it out a bit more at least one BBS implementation for
VMS was written in Fortran and DCL: https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax89a3/ualr/bbs/
The CS50x class at MIT starts off with this the 1st week...then heads to more heady material in upcoming weeks.
Vk3jed wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
Fortran's heyday seemed to have passed when I went to university, but there was a lot I did like about it, though we only had an
introduction, really.
Compilation was slow on floppy disks, though I
managed to use a RAMdisk as a scratchpad for the compiler,
Well that covers the "getting started" bit. :)
I started with FORTRAN in 1984, and by 1988 or so, the "bible" of scientific/math coding I used, "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" came out with a version in C. That was sort of the end of FORTRAN, it seemed.
I never did FORTRAN on PCs, mostly an HP 9000 mini and a Prime mainframe.
Here ya go:
https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computer-scie
https://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computerThat's Harvard, not MIT. :-)
Had a lousy night at work this evening. You made it better & had me laughing...especially since I needed that. Thanks!
Had a lousy night at work this evening. You made it better & had me laughing...especially since I needed that. Thanks!Sure thing! Glad it was taken in the spirit it was meant. :-)
On 02-13-20 06:54, poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Vk3jed <=-
I started with FORTRAN in 1984, and by 1988 or so, the "bible" of scientific/math coding I used, "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" came out with a version in C. That was sort of the end of FORTRAN, it seemed.
Compilation was slow on floppy disks, though I
managed to use a RAMdisk as a scratchpad for the compiler,
I never did FORTRAN on PCs, mostly an HP 9000 mini and a Prime
mainframe.
I just had a thought of BORLAND releasing Turbo FORTRAN and Turbo
COBOL.
On 02-13-20 16:41, pokeswithastick wrote to Vk3jed <=-
On Feb 12th 10:04 pm Vk3jed said...
Well that covers the "getting started" bit. :)
My team is doing Python at scale having spent many years building web services in C#. I have to say we've been more productive in Python but
we did sit down as a team to agree on what coding paradigms we were
going follow first. Everything gets peer reviewed as part of the merge because you can do some crazy things in Python. In C#, writing object oriented code feels right to me because the language is made for that.
F# feels right when I write functional code. With Python we have to be careful not to mix and match too much imperative, functional, oo and so forth.
Sounds like Python is so flexible you could metaphorically hang yourself with it. :)
On 02-15-20 06:01, pokeswithastick wrote to Vk3jed <=-
On Feb 15th 2:31 am Vk3jed said...
Sounds like Python is so flexible you could metaphorically hang yourself with it. :)
While burning down the room at the same time!
tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
Pr1me's were minis. :-) I don't think they ever had a machine
that would fall under the "mainframe" class.
into that space with some of the bigger VAXen and Alpha servers,
but not so much Pr1me. The Prime 750 was closer to a VAX 11/780
than a 3090, though was classed as a "supermini."
tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
Pr1me's were minis. :-) I don't think they ever had a machine
that would fall under the "mainframe" class.
Makes sense - I never got to see the machine itself, just banged away on an ADM3a terminal connected to it.
That I was able to see - I did my assembler class on an 11/780 that was
in the same building as the lab; apparently the class before did
assembly on a PDP/11 and hated it. The VAX has(had) a nice instruction set.
Sounds like Python is so flexible you could metaphorically hang yourselfwith
it. :)
It's still not Perl ;)
Sounds like Python is so flexible you could metaphorically hang
It's still not Perl ;)
On 02-18-20 17:58, Oli wrote to Vk3jed <=-
Sounds like Python is so flexible you could metaphorically hang yourself
with
it. :)
It's still not Perl ;)
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