[antimagic]

I have very fond memories of just how blazingly fast Turbo Pascal was at compiling on my Mac. It stunned me every time. I remember spending most of one summer writing a text adventure game with it, based in the Australian Gold Rush. It even had NPCs which was quite advanced for text adventures of the day (I think the only NPCs in adventure games that I had encountered up to that point were those in the Hobbit, and of course the bloody thief in Zork (although he wasn't really an NPC, but was implemented as a bunch of semi-random encounters)...

Good times. In particular, I remember having to implement my own strings, because for a text adventure you often want to have access to strings longer than 255 characters...

Sadly, I never managed to make the jump from writing console applications with TP to writing proper Mac GUI apps. But "Inside Macintosh" cost an absolute fortune at the time (for a 10 year-old kid at any rate), so I ended up scraping enough money together to buy another text book whose name escapes me. I must have read the first few chapters about a million times - they talked about handles and graphics ports etc, but I could never get any code from them to run in TP (I think they were assuming that you would be using MPW?).

Which brings me to the point of this long rambling message - did TP really support graphics programming on the Mac? I know my version of TP was an official bought copy, so we had the manual, but I don't remember ever seeing anything that explained GUI programming in there.

[pjmlp]

Well you also had Apple's Object Pascal as the original OS system programming language, which was the inspiration for the OOP approach Turbo Pascal adopted.

With that one, you could surely do graphics programming on the Mac.

As for Turbo Pascal itself, I wasn't aware it was available on the Mac as well.

[ido]

A more popular alternative to Apple's MPW on the mac was the 3rd party Lightspeed Pascal (later renamed THINK Pascal), which in many ways was quite similar to Turbo Pascal on the PC.

IIRC TP was just a quick port & had a very short life on the mac.

[Tloewald]

I didn't realize Turbo Pascal was ever released for the Mac. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) it was, but it was soon discontinued. Lightspeed/THINK Pascal/C ruled the roost on the Mac for a long time (thanks in large parts to just how horrible working with MPW was) until the PowerPC when Metrowerks took their place.

[jhallenworld]

I remember at the time that C was more compelling specifically because of the limited strings in Turbo Pascal. At least TP had variable length strings.. older PASCALs did not have this (they had space filled strings instead).

[aidenn0]

If you haven't played it still, play Planetfall, it has Floyd as an NPC and is one of the greats from the Infocom days.

[Supraperplex]

On DOS TP did support a texmode based "GUI".