Quote:
What's the difference between the MS compiler on one side and the Turbo / Borland products on the other side?
The former is from a company once led by a megalomaniacal marketing magician who couldn't stand to be second in anything, and yet was second for years. The latter company is the one that led the maniacs from micro-land with their development tools, starting with Turbo Pascal. This company was led by a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac who was famous for expensive stunts. (Actually, his proclivity for wasteful spending helped give Silicon Valley it's reputation for such things, even though this company was over the hill in Scotts Valley.) For example, he had a 1/5th scale model made of Stonehenge in England, and then shipped the pieces to his headquarters, where it got wrongly assembled by his minions. I worked in their headquarters for a time, in the latter days when the excesses and the megalomaniac were both long gone, and they had retreated to one building on the enormous campus. The company I worked for was leasing another building. It was a very nice place, with soccer field, Olympic pool and baseball diamond, and this subtly askew Stonehenge model.
But you wanted to know about technical differences? Well, in the DOS world, Borland's compilers were very, very, very quick. The name "Turbo" was not merely a marketing flourish. But Borland and MS got into a long term fight over the developer market, and it seemed the technical lead would waver, but mostly stayed in Borland's court while DOS was king. But after Windows was released, for some reason Borland couldn't deliver the goods quickly enough, and the quality suffered. I doubt this was due to the same sort of dirty tricks Microsoft was playing on Lotus, Stac, Novell, WordPerfect and a host of others during this same time. It's more likely Borland just forgot how to create developer tools. Amnesia, I would guess.
Be that as it may, my impression is that for DOS, Borland's tools are better, despite Microsoft's valiant attempts to poison Borland's devel... * Ahem, I guess that would that would be slander, if it weren't satire. But for Windows, Visual C-- and its co-conspirators are better, if only for the fact that they've been market leaders so long, that most of the cool examples out there on the net are targeted at those tools.
Regards,
Howard
EDIT:
Another big difference is that Borland's success began with Pascal, and they continued to support the language. They came out with an Object Oriented version that is in their Delphi products. You won't find comparable support for Pascal in Microsoft's toolbox.
Edited: 5 Sept 2007, 7:13 p.m.