Where can I find Turbo Pascal dialect description/reference? Is it still availiable in some place? I'm looking for the famous Turbo Pascal dialect description/reference(yes, the one from 80s/90s time) but I'm not having luck with google.
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2Turbo Pascal used to come with physical books. You might be able to find used copies. Do you have a specific need for Turbo Pascal, or are you looking for a Pascal reference? If the latter, look at Free Pascal's docs.– GrandmasterBJan 24, 2014 at 4:20
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2There is a good archive of historical documents at bitsaver, and they have a turbo pascal directory directory.– AProgrammerJan 24, 2014 at 10:11
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@GrandmasterB: A specific need for turbo pascal.– The MaskJan 24, 2014 at 16:14
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1 Answer
Since 2001, Borland has made it legal to download three vintage versions of Turbo Pascal for free: 1.0, 3.02 and 5.5.
You can get TP 5.5 here (you will have to fill out a short registration form if you haven't already visited the site).
You won't be able to run TP directly on any recent version of Windows. I was able to install it and get it running in a DOS (command-line) box inside a Windows Virtual PC box (Windows XP Mode) under Windows 7.
You will be downloading a zip file (tp55.zip) containing images of two disks: Disk1 and Disk2. All of the files need to be merged into one folder. Open a DOS box, and using CD navigate to the folder containing all of the downloaded files. Type install, and the program should start the installation. Be sure to change the drive letter of the source disk from A to C when prompted.
By default, it will create a directory C:\TP where it puts all of the files. For some reason, I got a message saying it couldn't run UNPACK.COM the first time I tried the install. So I manually copied UNPACK.COM from the install source directory to C:\TP, and it ran fine the second time.
After you have successfully installed the program, edit your environment variables so C:\TP is added to your PATH. That way you can run Turbo.exe from anywhere.
You can download a copy of the TP 5.5 manual here.
There is also a pretty good on-line tutorial for Turbo Pascal, with coverage of the object-oriented features introduced in TP 5.5 in Chapters 14 and 15.
For those that are interested in how the compiler works internally, there is a pretty neat website that discusses Turbo Pascal internals.
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Thanks very much! Also, do you know why is not the version 2 and 4 not availiable for download?– The MaskJan 24, 2014 at 16:16
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1@TheMask I have no idea why those particular versions were chosen. As far as I know, versions 2 and 4 are not freely available. Versions 2 and 3 were incremental updates of Version 1, but 4 was a major rewrite, changing the output from .COM to .EXE files and adding units and a full-screen user interface. Version 5 was an incremental update of 4, and as mentioned above, 5.5 added object oriented programming.– tcrosleyJan 24, 2014 at 20:22
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1I'm running TP55 and TP7 directly on Windows 7/32. The only option I had to change was the linker option, link buffer on disk.– davidMay 28, 2014 at 11:31