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Comment by cleaver | Hacker News Reader

I would be surprised if the CP/M version was any smaller. Turbo Pascal was smaller and faster than anything else at the time. However, the CP/M version would not have been a native compiler. Pascal generally compiled to p-code which was then interpreted (and was therefore slower).

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The CP/M version was a native compiler. The real limitation with the Z80 version was that recursion required either a compile time switch or annotation on the functions (It's so long ago I can't remember)

Somewhere I have a copy of just the editor portion of turbo pascal (from memory it's around 13K) that I snaffled when I worked for Borland in the mid 80s. Sadly no good anymore as 16 bit COM programs won't run on my 64 bit system.

I'd have to dig up an emulator, but I think there was no such limitation on the CP/M version.

> 16 bit COM programs won't run on my 64 bit system

Have you tried DOSBox?

Yep that would work, just a bit pointless except for nostalgia purposes.

And it must have made it into another gem from Borland: Sidekick. I used that extensively until I moved entirely off DOS. (Sidekick was a TSR--Terminate and Stay Resident-- utility program that could be launched by hotkey from single-tasking DOS. There was an editor, calculator and ASCII table! IIRC.)

UCSD Pascal compiled to p-code. Other Pascals compiled to native code. The Wikipedia entry for Turbo Pascal indeed mentions that the TP-generated executables were extremely fast, which was a revelation to UCSD users.

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