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From: farrell@banana.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Is borland abandoning Macintosh?
Message-ID: <1674@uqcspe.OZ>
Date: Sun, 29-Nov-87 22:01:57 EST
Article-I.D.: uqcspe.1674
Posted: Sun Nov 29 22:01:57 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 2-Dec-87 04:45:27 EST
References: <1394@bgsuvax.UUCP> <7576@prls.UUCP>
Sender: root@uqcspe.OZ
Reply-To: farrell@banana.cs.uq.OZ (Friendless Farrell)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
Lines: 56

In article <7576@prls.UUCP> gardner@prls.UUCP (Robert Gardner) writes:
>I don't have direct experience converting IBM Turbo to Mac Turbo but
>a colleague of mine does. I could provide more detailed info on request.
>However, to be brief, he was VERY disappointed with compatability
>between the two products. I was quite surprised to hear this, since
>you would think that the main motivation for doing the port was to give
>customers access to that large body of IBM Turbo code.
  I have had lots (2 years) of experience with Turbo on the PC, and some
(one 4000 line program) experience with Turbo on the Mac. I think
any idea of converting from PC to Mac is outrageously ambitious to say
the very least. As far as I'm concerned, they're two very different 
machines, and you can't reasonably expect to port stuff between them.
More to the point, the Mac interface is so much better there's no
reason you'd want to. (This is a PC owner saying this !)
  For a start, the whole structure of an application is nowhere near the same.
I haven't used the Mac Turbo standard Pascal units, because I can't see any
point, but I wouldn't expect to port stuff from the PC even if I was using
them.
>The problems I remember offhand were: movetoxy uses screen coordinates
>with (0,0) in the upper-left-hand corner of the IBM screen but in the
>middle of the Mac screen (I can't possibly imagine why this change was
>made); and most of the extensions to Pascal in IBM Turbo are not
>available in Mac Turbo. The Mac Turbo seems more concerned about Lisa
>Pascal compatability than IBM Turbo compatability. Strange choice in
>my opinion.
  I think this choice is marvellous. When I started programming the Mac,
I had a copy of Inside Mac - in fact I believe it was the Mac Development
System for the Lisa or something similarly archaic. If Turbo hadn't followed
the Lisa Pascal standard, I would have been blowing bubbles from the bottom
of a pile of deep shit.
  Then when I got Mac Revealed, I found I could copy big chunks of code
directly from the book into Turbo with no changes. That got the Mac 
dependent frame of the program done, so I could get on with the real work.
>
>Robert Gardner

  I think the real thing Turbo has to offer, which it does on both machines,
is the ability to compile into and run from memory, instead of dropping back
to the Finder all the time. Systems like this are especially needed on the
Mac where there's not really any idea of invoking an application to process
something without taking over the screen, and if an application takes over
the screen it should jolly well do something with it.
  The other (lesser) thing which Turbo has to offer is speed - it seems to me
that Borland products produce less secure code which gets the job done. (This is
not intended to be a slur on Borland - I love it myself.)
  In summary, I think Turbo Mac is a very useful product, but Turbo shouldn't
be considered a language which automatically runs on two radically
different machines.

				It's no wonder they call me ...

						Friendless

farrell@banana.uq.oz
DISCLAIMER : They're my opinions - sue me for all I'm worth.
"I have a degree but no money - what am I doing wrong ?"