With Z80 card plugged in, David Janda savours the pace - and the price - of the Turbo Pascal compiler version 2.0

Just two months after unwrapping a copy of Turbo Pascal I can see why it received such a good press in the US. It's fast, packed with features and very cheap.

The package, available for micros running CP/M-80 and MS/PCDOS, lets you edit, run and fine-tune programs which can then be run standalone, i.e. without the computer in main memory. At £60, you might think there's a catch but - take it from me - there isn't.

I ran version 2.0 on a BBC Model B fitted with the Torch Z80 card. There is a version for the Acorn Z80 second processor, so specify which Z80 card you've got when ordering.

Entering TURBO at the keyboard invokes a menu with several options. From this command level it is possible to edit, run, compile, save and load to disk. On-screen information includes the name of the logged-on disk and byte counts for text held in memory, as well as memory remaining.

Choosing 'O' from the menu displays some compiler options, which allow you to compile to memory which is the default, or to disk in the form of a '.COM' file. Sub-programs are easy to manipulate, and the 'H' option saves program code to disk without the Pascal library. This is used when you have a main file (.COM) that calls sub-programs with the extension '.CHN'.

Turbo Pascal has numerous extensions, including absolute address variables; bit/byte manipulation; direct access to memory and data ports; dynamic strings; in-line machine code generation; program chaining with common variables; type conversion function and much more.

A string type is one of the extensions to standard Pascal. A string can vary in length, but it is necessary to declare its maximum length when defined. A number of predefined procedures and functions to manipulate strings are provided.

File handling is also enhanced - you simply assign a filename to a variable. Random access is catered for and, as with strings, a number of procedures and functions are available for file handling.

The overlay system is among the best of all these facilities. This feature allows you to create programs that would not normally fit into memory at the same time. Instead, segments are loaded into RAM at run-time in the same area of memory. Overlays may be nested, but as they occupy the same area in memory they cannot call other overlays or be run alone.

The reference manual is excellent. The 300-odd pages contain chapters covering the Turbo implementatin, editor, file handling and so on. It looks a little daunting at first, but this is mainly because versions for all the Operating Systems are covered.

The manual can be treated as a reference work and, finding your way round is simplified with twelve pages of contents. The variety of typefaces proved to be a great benefit and, all in all, the manual was even pleasant to read.

I backed up the master disk and ran the terminal configuration program. There are 25 terminal types pre-listed and I was glad to see one for the Torch. Existing terminal types can be modified and, if your terminal is not listed, a series of questions allow you to create a file with your terminal's characteristics.

The configurator also allows the user to customise the editor commands to their own liking. Once done, the file with the terminal characteristics is automatically saved to disk.

IBM owners may be interested to know that Turbo Pascal supports colour and graphics for 80 x 25 or 40 x 25 text screens.

Any Wordstar user will have no problems adapting to the sophisticated screen editor provided. All the common CTRL sequences are used, as well as some new ones. Wordstar fanatics will be glad to learn that Turbo Pascal accepts source produced with no problems.

Turbo Pascal is fast - exceptionally fast. This applies not only to execution times for object code, but the whole compilation process too.

I found the additions to standard Pascal far outweighed the omissions. A number of Pascal programmers I have spoken to agree.

As far as faults are concerned, I really don't have any to report; it's that good.

Great software, good value for money - get it.

Features 5/5
Documentation 5/5
Performance 5/5
Overall value 5/5