Ankur Sethi has done a brilliant blog post on the differences between compiler, C++, Turbo C, IDE (and if you are sane enough to be interested) GCC and Dev C++. Ankur has explained all of it very clearly, so I won’t reinvent the wheel. I strongly recommend that you go through his post.

A couple of weeks back, I was talking with my Programming Fundamentals teacher here at VIT about the possibility of completely migrating to Dev C++ at least or dump our Windows 2000 systems in favor of Red Hat/Open Suse running GCC. This will really help in fostering a climate of open-source in the college. For God’s sake, Turbo C was developed in 1992 and is completely out of sync with the new standards of C/C++. Other schools might need to use some proprietary software but computing sciences can surely take the first step.