h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's true that many of the additions in Turbo Pascal over Pascal aren't portable as such, but Turbo Pascal programs still weren't confined to the Intel-based PC.

For the Atari ST and TT, a home/personal computer based on the Motorola 68000 CPU and its successors that was rather successful in the late 1980s, we had Pure Pascal, distributed by Application Systems of Heidelberg, Germany, which offered quite a lot of Turbo Pascal compatibility as well as its speed and quality.

Most used it to write GUI-based applications for the ST, and of course that's what it was made for. Still, a command-line program could just be built on both platforms, and porting a graphic game from DOS to the Atari was just a matter of hours. Of course, you had to account for the ST's limited graphic abilities if you wanted a real product, but for anything that didn't use either the Turbo Vision user interface on the PC nor the GEM user interface on the Atari, cross-platform development was definitely possible ... and done.

Hi Ermel,

thanks for your comments and for the Atari information. I've never used an Atari ST, so I've never heard of Pure Pascal. The Atari's main programming language was C, I suppose?

Regarding cross-platform development, what I've noticed (and you're saying the same, basically) is that the language itself is not the big problem, in an standardised language you could easily port to other compilers. It's the tools and libraries that cause the problems.



SchrEck Inc.