I've read that large bits of it were written in 68k assembly too, so those parts...

ArkyBeagle · on Oct 5, 2016

You can't write systems programs in Pascal without escape-to-assembly. My first big 'C' project was a significant quality improvement over the Pascal it replaced, partly because of this.

pjmlp · on Oct 6, 2016

Funny I managed to do that in Turbo Pascal.

Also C standard library cannot be implemented without using Assembly, unless one makes use of extensions not defined in ANSI C.

ArkyBeagle · on Oct 6, 2016

You mean you managed with assembly, right? We were able to Vastly reduce the assembler footprint when using 'C'.

pjmlp · on Oct 6, 2016

No I managed to do that with Turbo Pascal.

If I was talking about inline Assembly, which Turbo Pascal supported and to this day still isn't part of ANSI C, I would have said so.

The only times I actually was forced to use inline Assembly was to optimize graphics rendering and create a mouse device driver.

Both of them were a one time project.

Once upon a time I used to have some fun asking C devs for features not available in Turbo Pascal, while at the same time showing off all the safety and large project features that Turbo Pascal had and C to this day still lacks.

Back on those MS-DOS and Windows 3.x days there wasn't any feature that C compilers had and Turbo Pascal didn't had a similar feature.

ArkyBeagle · on Oct 6, 2016

How would you do an INT 21 call? It's been too long; I don't remember that being possible except as either just assembler or inline assembler.

pjmlp · on Oct 7, 2016

With the MsDos procedure.

    program demo;
    uses Dos;
    
    var
        regs : Registers;
    
    begin
        regs.ah := $02;
        regs.dl := $07;
        MsDos (regs);  { Beep! }
    end.