S-BASIC vs. Turbo Pascal

My next experiment was to take some of those S-BASIC programs and convert them to Turbo Pascal.

It wasn't a surprise that the conversion was pretty easy.  Much easier than M-BASIC to S-BASIC.  S-BASIC has more in common with Pascal than MBASIC.

 

Overall, Turbo Pascal is much better than S-BASIC.

Turbo Pascal has an IDE.  With S-BASIC, I needed to use an external editor.  The one that I had was TE, but that's actually a relatively new program.   But I probably could have used Wordstar - to keep the Turbo Pascal comparison apples-to-apples.

Turbo Pascal can compile to memory.  This greatly increases the speed of which it tells you where your errors are and makes it able for you to test your program quicker.

With S-BASIC, it's save, exit the editor, run the compiler, go back into the editor - and remember the line that had the problem.

As far as creating an actual .COM file, Turbo Pascal might have a slight speed advantage, but not enough to really notice.

 

So the reason for S-BASIC star not rising is proven.  Turbo Pascal is so much better.

Please don't take this as meaning that S-BASIC is bad.  On the contrary, it's really good, and if Turbo Pascal hadn't come out, it probably would have gotten much more traction.