I bought a copy of the Turbo C compiler 1.0 months before
picking up this wonderful tutorial by P. J. Ponzo. I
wanted to keep the archive size down for uploading the
file, but if you have a chance -- do pick up the original
file. The display program itself was written in C while
the author was learning the language. I have been
programming in Turbo Pascal for several years, and somehow
the little funny characters and syntax of C scared me away
from it for some time.

C is by no means a language for a beginner, but if you
have a little knowledge of the machine hardware and memory
addressing you should have no trouble at all after a few
days putting out a useful program or two. The funny
symbols become clear to you when you see how concisely you
can do screen writes. The meaning becomes quite clear when
you've coded only a few lines, and you have a program that
does a whole lot.

If you are a scientist or engineer, and your goal is just
to do some floating point arithmetic or perhaps even some
more complicated mathematical algorithms, you will find
that you really don't need to learn much to get your
numbers in nice rows and columns to the console or standard
list device.

I learned to code assembler on an 8080 microprocessor back
when you PIPPED instead of COPIED and STATTED instead of
doing a DIR. For some reason when I looked at C it looked
like Martian or something. After some play you'll see that
it is like having the facility of an assembler with the
ease of a higher level language.

If you are a Turbo Pascal Programmer, then pick up a copy
of the TURBOTOC.ARC file that is out on the boards. This
is there promotion for their Quick C and C 5.0 compilers.
I have tested the example programs, and with the exception
of the first example which includes math.h these examples
will compile in Quick C as well. You can use the TURBOTOC
translator to use your Pascal code as pseudocode for C.
Microsoft claims that TURBOTOC will even translate the
graphics parts so you can really speed up your C training
in a hurry.

Thanks to P. J. Ponzo, I now can read Martian quite well.
After going through this tutorial, I am no longer confused
when I enter a computer book store about which book to
purchase. The syntax to display the lessons is:

A> display lesson#


Vic Rebrovich