2021 retro-link! https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/cstr100 - Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. (troff source)
@fanf That article (more specifically, the people sharing it as a take-down of Pascal) used to annoy the hell out of me. I grew up with Turbo Pascal and its spiritual successors before switching to C and most of the complaints did not apply at all.
@pervognsen @fanf I keep wondering if I'm wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses but literally last week a younger colleague was playing around with TP 7.0 (I think it was, one of the vers with a Turbo Vision IDE) in a JS-based emulator on a webpage and was very surprised by how good the UX was, especially considering it's a DOS program from the early 90s.
Not just of the IDE, the language/compiler too.
@rygorous @pervognsen @fanf It was before my time, but I just searched around and found this: https://archive.org/details/tpuve. And I too am quite surprised at how coherent and usable it is!
@aminom @rygorous @pervognsen @fanf ooooh, nice.
over the weekend, after reading that rust-gamedev post, i was thinking it would be nice to find one or more compiled languages that are a better fit for rapid prototyping, thought of TP, and then downloaded the current installer for Delphi. And that's when i found out that they do not support macOS as a host platform (so i can't use it).
so it's great that we can just load TP up in a browser like this!
@aminom @rygorous @pervognsen @fanf can anyone recommend any Turbo Pascal books and/or magazine articles from the 80's (the ones that would give you code examples to type in by hand)?
@JamesWidman @aminom @rygorous @fanf I don't think I read any books on TP. I recall Borland's manual was good. Aside from older friends, I mostly picked up stuff from random BBS tutorials (e.g. Denthor's tutorials which I'm sure would make me cringe now) and example programs.
@JamesWidman @aminom @rygorous @fanf Oh yeah, definitely cringe: "The ASPHYXIA team uses neither putpixel; we use a DMA-Straight-To-Screen-Kill-Yer-Momma-With-An-Axe type putipixel which is FAST. We will give it out, but only to those of you who show us you are serious about coding."
@pervognsen @JamesWidman @aminom @fanf Optimized putpixel, oh dear.
Apparently Chaos once ruined someone's entire month with this simple exchange (back when nobody know how to do 3D properly):
Them: "We've optimized this vector rotation routine _really_ well. _All_ 12 multiplies are as fast as we can get them." (they were doing 3 successive rotations by Euler angles with 4 muls each.)
Chaos: "12? I need 9."
@rygorous @JamesWidman @aminom @fanf Good thing Glide settled on the right API granularity once and for all: draw a single triangle at a time with grDrawTriangle.
@pervognsen @rygorous
Man that thread. Those Denthor and Aspyhxia rotating cube (and logo IIRC) demos must have been how I learned some first 3d math, and then there was some plaintext doc that had the 4x4 matrix rundown (I think Lithium/VLA and Andre Yew). There was also a commanche-style heightfield raytracer from Stephen H Don and a nice/clean doom-style renderer called MOOD by Alexei Frounze, all of which I got from a good friend who had internet. Departure ticket from the Pascal life was a C++ engine source that was, I think, called Focus, and a Q2-like engine named Twister
