Brings up a strong nostalgia from me. Around that time computers were becoming mainstream and available where I was in the UK, and I grew up acquiring old cast-off computers and tinkering. For me there was an 'assembly language masterclass' book (I was a beginner and this was my first serious tech book and I had to sink or swim) that went into a lot of 32-bit programming for the 386 (which I never had) but got me far enough along. It was that and computer magazines which were really programming magazines, which were a thing and quite popular back then.
Remember fondly how transformative it was to move from Basic to a copy of Turbo Pascal 6 and it's asm keyword that I got passed on a floppy disk in the playground.
Ah that was the time when it was just obvious that you could entertain yourself on a computer by creating things, however small, instead of just consuming them.
By the time I got computer games, I was thinking about them as programs not games and I got my entertainment by getting into the modding scene.
Do you also feel like you did projects in your teen years that you wouldn't pull off today?
I coded assembly (Z80) in a disk editor, having no assembler, just a handwritten list of opcodes.
I wrote a chat client app (in Delphi) HAVING NO INTERNET at home, I went to a cafe, recorded a dump with Wireshark, printed it on a dot matrix printer, and used a marker pen to highlight the bytes I understand the meaning of.
Yup. I wrote a TSR program to extend Deluxe Paint II on PC with animation features. Never heard about APIs, and simply copied data from the VGA memory, overlaying my own user interface on top of DP.
The thought of doing this with contemporary systems just seems ... wrong :)
Well back then we didn’t have all of that memory for those fancy abstraction layers. Sticking your finger in the framebuffer probably wasn’t the worst way to do that!
I noticed I missed it and so I went back to it a few years ago. I have old systems (mostly from the 70-90s; a few newer because my love for Sun Sparc & pre-Intel SGI) and newer ones like RISC-V boards and low-powered small devices to thinker with. None of this has any commercial value but it feels so much better than the LLM grifting / code slinging for profit. I wish I found a way to combine them, but I feel it's not possible.
In those days, unless you were very privileged, you had to learn things from a maybe 1 book, maybe a magazine (some matrix printed stapled pages in my province) and, in my case, without having a computer for the first year of learning basic & assembly. I just had a 2nd hand book + those magazines and some old folk telling me I should learn it. When we did get a computer (borrowed), I knew listings by heart which I typed in, changed and explored. It was somehow nicer than instant gratification we have now. I worked out assembly listings in HEX (I did not know what an assembler was or that it existed) on paper in class (school was of course boring af) and typed it in when the borrowed computer was back. Very nice times.
When I was teen moving into adulthood, I couldn't understand why Pascal is being abandoned and people are moving into C and C++. I often think how would the software world look like if that did not happen. It's such a shame that we lost such a simple, yet productive language, in the commercial settings. And now we have Rust as the next winning choice, language even more complex than C++.
Don't forget that, at least in the pascal that was used in my university programming course, all data structures have a fixed size. If you want variable size, you need to allocate them on the heap and free them manually, so it is not clear that this is going to be that much easier than C or C++ in practice. Actually attending the lecture about this I was a bit shocked that it was necessary to free memory manually and I thought to myself 'isn't this going to lead to a lot of trouble'. Turns out my 19-year-old self was right about that.
Why would you say that Pascal was (is?) a simple and productive? I wrote some software in Turbo Pascal and Delphi at that time, and was usually envying the C++ freedom. All the headers had to be translated to Pascal first. Pointer arithmetic was kludgy. I really wonder how could I do more complicated things, like large byte buffer with variant structures, parsing in Pascal.
Headers are the huge achilles heel of the C-based languages. Pascals modules were MUCH better. Pascal always built code faster in my experience, because it wasn't parsing megabytes of headers just to compile a hello world program. This also probably makes a pascal compile much simpler to implement as it's not 2 languages layered together.
Macros in C are an utter disaster imo. If you want to get an AST for any piece of code you have to know what's defined so you must know exactly what the build system is going to do to the code i.e. the code isn't self-contained. If you use one build system to build for production and another in your IDE for development then you might get totally different results.
C,C++ have a lot of ways to do one thing and Pascal tends to have one. The more you have to work on other people's code the more attractive Pascals' "one way" seems.
I mostly meant the DOS era, when you accessed hardware directly, there were pretty much no libraries. Further on, if people did not start using C++, Pascal would have to evolve to allow writing the things that were previously done in assembly, and libraries would be done in that language as well. That did not happpen, so C++ won and writing Pascal code was even more complex because you had to brindge the C APIs.
What things that were previously done in assembly do you mean?
I remember Delphi nicely allowed including C++ files and assembly in the project too, so there's that. It is a very wordy language, but apart from the need to separate declarations and implementation, was pretty nice to use, and powerful.
Whereas if K&R had adopted Pascal (and tweaked the language to support whatever limitations they ran into when making the OS) instead of inventing C to make Unix, your experience would have been flipped; should C++ have come along, it would be the one with the header translation costs etc?
Wirth went on to create Modula2 and Oberon and make operating systems in them. It is fun to imagine a world where that was the way chosen forward instead of C to C++.
Brings up a strong nostalgia from me. Around that time computers were becoming mainstream and available where I was in the UK, and I grew up acquiring old cast-off computers and tinkering. For me there was an 'assembly language masterclass' book (I was a beginner and this was my first serious tech book and I had to sink or swim) that went into a lot of 32-bit programming for the 386 (which I never had) but got me far enough along. It was that and computer magazines which were really programming magazines, which were a thing and quite popular back then.
Remember fondly how transformative it was to move from Basic to a copy of Turbo Pascal 6 and it's asm keyword that I got passed on a floppy disk in the playground.
Ah that was the time when it was just obvious that you could entertain yourself on a computer by creating things, however small, instead of just consuming them.
By the time I got computer games, I was thinking about them as programs not games and I got my entertainment by getting into the modding scene.
I coded assembly (Z80) in a disk editor, having no assembler, just a handwritten list of opcodes.
I wrote a chat client app (in Delphi) HAVING NO INTERNET at home, I went to a cafe, recorded a dump with Wireshark, printed it on a dot matrix printer, and used a marker pen to highlight the bytes I understand the meaning of.
I miss it so much.
The thought of doing this with contemporary systems just seems ... wrong :)
If so - doubles the magnitude of this achievement.
Macros in C are an utter disaster imo. If you want to get an AST for any piece of code you have to know what's defined so you must know exactly what the build system is going to do to the code i.e. the code isn't self-contained. If you use one build system to build for production and another in your IDE for development then you might get totally different results.
C,C++ have a lot of ways to do one thing and Pascal tends to have one. The more you have to work on other people's code the more attractive Pascals' "one way" seems.
I remember Delphi nicely allowed including C++ files and assembly in the project too, so there's that. It is a very wordy language, but apart from the need to separate declarations and implementation, was pretty nice to use, and powerful.
Wirth went on to create Modula2 and Oberon and make operating systems in them. It is fun to imagine a world where that was the way chosen forward instead of C to C++.
Also thanks for the Transputer deep dive, TIL!
Love the source code you posted on Github with its Spanish comments.