Turbo Pascal for the Atari ST

The fastest Pascal around

Pascal, created by the late Niklaus Wirth¹ in 1970, became very popular in the 1980s. It was a great teaching language and it helped usher in structured programming, which surprisingly had a lot of opponents in the 80s. This was probably because Pascal was just to large to work well on 8-bit computers. Sure, most of them had a Pascal implementation but they were usually slow or severely limited.

But in 1983, Borland introduced Turbo Pascal for DOS on the PC. At just $49, it really got a lot of people to start using Pascal. I remember using the DOS version for some school projects in the late 80s.

On the Atari ST (released in 1985) Pascal was also one of the more popular languages. C was clearly the most-used, but I think it would have been a tight race between Pascal or BASIC for 2nd place.

Another language that showed up on the ST in its early years was Modula-2, another creation of Mr. Wirth. Although similar to Pascal, Modula-2 did not catch on in general. This is probably because Pascal was more entrenched and many implementations had extended it with features similar to what Modula-2 offered, particularly around the ability to modularize code into separate libraries (or units).

One of the first Pascal compilers available for the ST was Personal Pascal and it was the one I used the most. Other notable Pascal implementations were Hispeed Pascal and Prospero Pascal. But late in the ST’s life cycle there was another product called Pure Pascal.

Pure Pascal was an integrated Pascal compiler created by Pure Software and Borland of Germany and released in 1992, but only in Germany. It was essentially Turbo Pascal for the ST!