Back on April 8th, I wrote
Borland's community site has a freely available download of Turbo Pascal v5.5 for DOS at http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,20803,00.html
It should run on a PocketPC or WinCE machine under PocketDOS (not free) http://www.pocketdos.com/. I'll give it a go and report back.
Gave it a go. It does work. However, IMO it's not a satisfactory experience on a machine with a virtual keyboard.
Hello,
the Jornada 690 and it's relatives (680,7xx) does have a good real keyboard.
BTW: The older TurboC 2.0 for DOS runs fine on an HP-200LX;-)
Regards,
Raymond
I think your point about the keyboard is really important. I find that even the good HP keys are pretty cumbersome for writing "programs" as opposed to keystroke programs (in other words, writing a long and involved rpl program, using lots of alpha "words" would be much better done on a big computer and then uploaded). That being said, I think keystroke programming (in either RPN or RPL) is unbeatable by any high level language, including pascal, for essentailly 100% mathematical constructions. (Maybe mathcad is even better?--I only used matcad once).
Thanks for your post(s) about PASCAL--I now have turbo loaded on the intel machine and it is fun to be able to write simple code with it after a long hiatus.
While I have wished for a connection to a keyboard for both the 41 and 48 machines, I've never had any issues with programming on the 75, 71, 95, or 200lx keyboards (admittedly, the 71 is a bit iffy in that)
I do think that having more than one way- when possible- is a good thing. And I'd enjoy it if I could use rocky mountain basic, RPL, keystroke, assembler, and a lispy language all on one handheld platform.
I might end up writing more of my code on a desktop (though thus far it's not the case in life. I'm a handheld addict.)-- but being able to, and having the best plausible engineering to do so- on the handheld, is essential to any programmable machine, IMO.
This always ends up being the one biggest problem I have with wince.... (the second biggest is the idiocy of the OS itself)
I still say that a qwerty 48/49 (say, in the 95 format, or even the 71 format with a bigger screen) would be marketable...