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Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video
Leonel writes "Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
Me too.
I still keep a copy of Borland C++ 3.1 (the last DOS version).
It was an awesome IDE, very productive.
Good old days.
(Not that today is less bright, Vim/gcc/gdb has it all, too.)
factor 966971: 966971
Delphi ain't your father's Pascal. It's a modern, object-oriented interoperable language. The main advantage isn't the language itself, but the class library (VCL) and the form designer, which is the best tool around to build user interfaces (ask Skype), while still having the ability of having your code neatly encapsulated in classes separated from the presentation layer.
.Net offerings. if that's your language of choice, you can use C++ with the VCL (or for plain WinAPI applications, if you feel inclined).
Anyway, Delphi is only half of the picture here. There's Turbo C++ and C# offerings along with the native Delphi and Delphi for
Basically, the explorer versions are advanced IDEs for these languages, free of change, allowing commercial development. There's your motivation.
These days Borland Developer Studio gives me time to make some coffee.
BUT .Net 1.1? Seriously? We've been at 2.0 for some time now, right? Did Borland just miss that announcement?
> Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe).
Microsoft lifted the end date back in April. It's being offered for free forever. Well, as long as forever goes with Microsoft (The VS2003 toolchain didn't take long to disappear).
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Are these available for download?
:*)
Well, there's that
27 days, 9 hrs, 40 mins, 30 secs
until the Turbo(s) are here!
timer there. Might explain the missing download links.
I used Delphi, Builder, and Visual Studio - and I found Borland's intellisense much less responsive than the one in the Microsoft IDE.
Although I use it with not-that-complex projects, in my case the difference between speed is evident: it takes forever for the list of relevant options to show up in Borland's IDEs, while in VS the speed at which it shows up and can be used is the same, even after the project grows in complexity.
The saddest poem
Turbo Prolog was a variation of PDC Prolog, a Danish project. It was a compiled Prolog, and in Prolog fashion taught the user to think backwards, a sometimes useful technique. When Turbo Prolog ended, PDC Prolog continued with the product, later morphing it to Visual Prolog. Somewhere, I have them all. See http://www.visual-prolog.com/ - a new version 7 was coincidentally released a week ago, and a free Personal Edition is available.
I'm actually a *new* Delphi developer. I've only begun using Delphi within the last 3 months, and I'll be honest, I fought using it tooth and nail. I was so certain that C# was so much better in every situation that I wouldn't even consider Delphi. However, we began doing development for some apps that would be run in WinPE, and I decided to fire up Delphi 2006 and give it a whirl.
I was blown away. I created my application in less than 3 days (minus user testing) --- but the best part is that my app was *fast*. Nearly as fast as if it was written in C/C++. My app was moderately complex (or at least not of the 'hello world' variety), performing user authentication via SOAP connection, connectivity to SQL database and record inserts, XML parsing, and multiple forms.
I have to admit, being able to code Win32 with drag/drop components that just work is refreshing. All without a framework or DLL runtime requirement. I am a Delphi convert, and plan to continue using Delphi to develop Win32 apps. However, I'm not a zealot and I know that C# has it's place and I plan to continue using it where it makes sense.
The more tools that a developer can have in their toolbox, the better.
Yes, you can.
You might want to try SETEDIT or RHIDE. SETEDIT is an editor and RHIDE is an IDE, both written using the Turbo Vision toolkit.
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
Does it still use pascal's weird funky operators chosen simply to be different from other languages?
Sorry, I don't have a clue what you're referring to. Delphi uses Pascal's perfectly commonplace operators chosen to be similar to myriad other Algol-derived or -inspired languages.
Just because you've never dared stray from braces languages doesn't mean that any other convention is "weird", "funky", or deliberately contrary, you know.
You mean like +, -, *, /? What about 'and', 'or', 'xor', 'div', or 'mod'? How are those "funky" compared to '==' '&&' '||' '^'? They seem pretty clear and descriptive to me. Perhaps you are referring to APL ;-)? Operator precidence is slightly different than C/C++, C# or Java... but not cripplingly so. In all fairness, Pascal does tend to be a little more verbose, but that is intentional in the design in order to encourage better self-documentation (yes, you should still comment your code!). Other differences include: The semi-colon, ';', is statement separator not a terminator, so there are a few places where it is optional and at least one place where it is illegal. The compiler is single-pass recursive descent. It is blazingly fast (on the order of >1M lines of code/minute on today's hardware). As a matter of fact, we find that the bottle-neck in the compiler is more on the I/O side than the actual compiling/codegen side. The produced code is very well optimized(yes, it *could* be better, but there are time/value tradeoffs being made).
.NET/IL compiler version.
As I write this, work is proceeding to add new language features such as generics (parameterized types), partial classes (class fragments), and some other items considered very "modern" by today's language standards. The Delphi language offers a significant level of source compatibility between the native Win32/ia32 compiler version and the
I'm not sure how Borland will compete with Micro$oft for the student market. Students whose departments participate in the Microsoft Distribution Network Academic Alliance, get free versions of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, along with loads of other M$ software. Granted, it is for non-commercial use but they are full, un-crippled versions. I know, some would say that all M$ software is crippled, but you know what I mean.
My students are instructed to bring CD-R's the first week of class so they can get their free VS 2005 Pro. I used to use Borland's Turbo products, many years ago when I was first starting out in college. I don't remember how much I payed for them but I do remember them being student friendly.
How is Borland going to compete when college departments can pay $799 for the first year and $399 for each additional year of the MSDNAA and be able to give their students thousands of dollars worth of free software as well as install that software for free in their labs?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
No, I use it in Linux all the time. FreePascal and Lazarus are being actively developed and are very powerful. Most code you wrote in Delphi/Kylix can be compiled (most of the time with little or no changes) with FPC with the delphi mode compiler directive turned on.