| Turbo Pascal was the breakthrough product that
established Borland International in 1983. Ever since, it
has remained entrenched as the most popular midrange
programming language on PCs — more powerful than BASIC, and
surpassed only by C and C++ for professional development.
With the recent release of Turbo Pascal 7.0 and Borland
Pascal with Objects 7.0, Borland hopes to retain its
position as programmers migrate from DOS to Windows. These new releases add numerous enhancements and also update Borland's entire Pascal line. TP 7.0 is positioned as an entry-level language. It's for programmers who want to write DOS applications in real mode (i.e., 8086/8088 compatible) and learn object-oriented programming. Next up the ladder is Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, a Windows-only package that remains unchanged. BPO 7.0 is the high-end package for professionals who want to write object-oriented code for either DOS or Windows. It was created by combining all that comes with TP 7.0 and TPW 1.5 and adding some additional goodies as well. For example, BPO has a new DOS development environment for writing large 80x86 protected-mode applications using extended memory beyond 640 KB. Although TP has a command-line compiler that runs in protected mode, it targets real mode only. Another major new feature is that BPO lets you write DOS programs that can call routines in Windows DLLs — something not found in any other programming language. On top of that, BPO makes it a snap to write your own DLLs. It takes only three more lines of code than declaring an internal function or procedure, and two of those lines are Begin and End. Windows programmers will appreciate BPO's new printer objects, which reduce the amount of code you must write to print documents. The object browser is improved and can be accessed outside the debugger. A new utility, Turbo Profiler, helps you analyze and optimize your code. Another utility, WinSight, is an improved version of the Windows message viewer in TPW. And if your program crashes on a fatal error, a new postmortem debugging tool called WinSpector will find out why. Other new features that are common to both TP and BPO will please DOS and Windows programmers. For example, the compiler's capacity has been quadrupled to more than 4 million lines of code in files as large as 25 MB. New optimizations produce faster-running code, especially on 386 machines, because the run-time library automatically uses the 386's 32-bit instructions for long-integer math. According to Borland, all text-file I/O routines — including Read, Write, Read-Ln, and WriteLn operations with all data types — are 30 percent to 100 percent faster. To informally test this, I used a beta version of BPO to recompile some programs written with the previous version of TP and noticed an improvement in speed. New reserved words include Break and Continue, for ending or resuming execution in the middle of a loop; PChar, for declaring null-terminated strings; Inherited, for calling the method of an ancestor object without specifying the ancestor's type; and Public, for separating methods and fields that are public or private. When calling functions and procedures, you can now pass constants as well as variables and values. You can also pass arrays or strings whose sizes aren't specified in the subprogram's declaration. Almost the only thing missing in Borland's Pascal lineup is a visual programming interface, such as the one in Microsoft's Visual Basic. There's no doubt that Borland has greatly reduced the amount of code you must write to construct a Windows user interface, thus turning what could be days of tedious work in C into a few hours' of work in Pascal. But with Visual Basic, even a nonprogrammer can build a user interface and event framework in minutes without any code at all. Although BPO and TPW include Resource Workshop, a Macintosh-style resource editor, it's poorly integrated, and you still have to wire the resources into your code and manage your own event loop. To address this issue, Borland is offering a $49.95 add-on called ProtoGen, which lets you visually create a user interface and automatically generate Windows-ready Pascal source code. Also, I've heard hints of a better solution still to come. Until then, Borland's Pascal may not be the easiest route to Windows programming, but it's the easiest way to write high-performance Windows programs. The FactsTurbo Pascal 7.0$149 System requirements: DOS 3.3 or higher, 512 KB of RAM, and a hard drive or two floppy drives. Protected-mode compiler requires a 286 or higher, 2 MB of RAM, and a hard drive. Borland Pascal with Objects 7.0 $495; $149 upgrade from any previous version of Turbo Pascal. System requirements: A 286 or higher with 2 MB of RAM, a hard drive with 27 MB of free space, DOS 3.3 or higher, Windows 3.x, EGA or better graphics, and a mouse. Borland International, Inc. 1800 Green Hills Rd. P.O. Box 660001 Scotts Valley, CA 95067 (800) 331-0877 (408) 438-8400 fax: (408) 439-9273 Copyright 1994-1997 BYTE |