Future Microchips

[ ... ]

I learned both on my OS-9 system, except that the Pascal was an ISO standard one (with some extensions), not the rather non-standard version which the Turbo Pascal was. When I think of the hoops I jumped through to handle passing all the variable declarations to the multiple programs of a suite I wrote for handling the membership files of an organization for which I was the membership chair while working in Pascal. The C was a lot easier to deal with, because it had the ability to read in "include" files, while I had to write a pre-processor (which I called "include" in C for merging common files into the Pascal source.) But I did the actual porting of the membership programs to C on my first (v7) unix box, not the OS-9, where I was using the C mostly to write tools (like the "include" program for the Pascal).

But the Pascal certainly drove out of my head a lot of the bad practices which I had learned with BASIC. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

You can write beautifully structured BASIC, Don. You don't *have* to, but you can if you want to.

QuickBasic 4.5 from the mid 90's has C and Pascal syntax blended in while still supporting the old Basic instructions: INCLUDE, SELECT CASE, DO...LOOP, WHILE..WEND, even pointers so it can CALL ABSOLUTE a hex string of machine language. It's wordier than C, you can't just type "struct" but you can create them by first defining the type, so it's more self-documenting. When run in DOS it gives full access to the I/O hardware, at Unitrode I used it to control IC development circuits connected to the printer port. It's somewhat functional in Windows by invoking NT shell scripts to copy and rename long-name files.

jsw

Hi Jim,

I'm interested in the long file name issues. Do you have any examples handy?

Richard

========== An easier and more reliable solution may be the console compiler from "Power Basic." Runs like a text based DOS program within windows with no DOS box or emulator required. They also have a "Windows" version.

PowerBasic appears to be an evolution of Borland's Turbobasic.

See their forums at

is also a very low activity NG.

The only shortcoming I have come across is the lack of a complex number function library.

Long filenames see

Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

Yes -- but I got my start in Motorola 6800 assembly language, and even wrote self-modifying code in that -- which resided mostly in ROM. :-) I had a lot of bad things to unlearn by the time I got to Pascal.

While BASIC-09 (for OS-9 only) had most of those, the "CALL ABSOLUTE" did not exit, simply because all procedures and programs were position independent and reentrant, so there was no certainty that the code which you wanted to call would really *be* there. :-)

But -- it allowed procedures to be separately compiled, and called from within any BASIC-09 program -- even if other programs were already calling the same procedure.

Yes -- quite complex types could be defined -- with the major nuisance being that since each procedure had its own memory map, there could be *no* global variables -- so *everything* had to be passed. The only reasonable way to deal with the passing of large numbers of variables was to declare them all into a "TYPE", and just pass the whole type. And to return a lot of things, you had to return a TYPE too, IIRC.

Only things running as parts of the kernel (device drivers and descriptors and such) could access hardware at absolute addresses, similar to unix.

O.K.

Enjoy, DoN.

Thanks for the offering, George, but at this time I don't want to buy another event driven compiler.

I have a couple of versions of Visual BASIC, and hate all of them.

What I'd like to see is an updated version of QB 4.5 that can deal with Windows funkyness a little easier.

Have you tried FreeBasic?

As Michael mentioned, try looking at FreeBasic:

I've only messed around with it some, but liked what I saw. It compiles everything to an exe, you run that to see your program in operation. It has command line parameters that can make it QB4.5 compatible. A nice set of help files too, take a look at the chm help file for a taste of it:

You can find old versions of QB4.5, QBX, VB for Dos here:

They can be interesting, problematic though to extract the working files on newer operating systems...

I've got all of those - all the way back to CP/M versions.

Andrew Lynch (posts here some) has brought that back to life with his N8VEM group.

A while back I wrote a simple movie inventory system to keep track of the movie files on my external drives.

If consists of a series of (shelled) batch files to created directory files (got around the long file name issue that way) and a QB 4.5 back end that does the formatting and sorting, and write the inventory file, links, etc.

It took a couple of hours to figure out how I wanted it to work, how to make it work, and fine tune it. A very nostalgic and pleasant experience.

Dealing with the "Visual" languages, I seem to spend more time trying to figure out how Microsoft wants things done.

And they love complication! I suspect that's so the rest of us will leave programming to the pros (them).

There are really only two issues I have with QB running on a Windoze box.

1) the long file names. and 2) the huge file sizes. Dealing with gig and terra sizes in QB? not exactly simple.

So, ok, guys, as a Christmas treat for myself, I've downloaded FreeBASIC and will play with it and see how I like it.

Thanks.

Richard

In the "for what it's worth" category, at first blush?

Not too bad.

It compiled my existing QB code (with the Lang qb option) without complaining. Good for it? Good for me? Maybe both?

Getting the code converted to Freebasic too a little doing. Not bad - a lot like VB/VC conventions.

I pulled the hot link part out (for now), and did away with the subroutine calls (for now) so all is inline.

The biggest change was explicit variable declaration.

It compiled and ran perfectly. But then, at this level, it's pretty trivial program. Less than 100 lines even with the subroutine calls changed to inline code.

Figure out the call requirements for subs and it will shrink to less that half that!

I do wish the documentation could be had in book form. Electronic documentation is easier to maintain, but, at least for me, a book is still the way to study things. Call me old fashioned...

Then you can try FreeDOS. :)

I have it already - for an 8088 antique project.

It sounds like you'll be busy for a while then. :)

I feel your pain, perusing hard copy is my preferred method of learning too.

I like the electronic versions for searching and as a quick reminder for getting the syntax right. Bummer for just poking around in though and learning basic concepts.

It is good to hear that you got it working for your little project though. It should be able to work with long file names okay too.

Then is choked like a first time girl on Def Seg...

That was for screen save/restore (direct hardware access).

I had some problems trying to use Graphics screens with FreeBasic, like "SCREEN 12". I think it tried to create an exe using DirectX commands which are too new for my system. What I did was add "SetEnviron("fbgfx=GDI")" towards the beginning of my bas code. My old WinNT seems to be able to live with that. Not sure if what you are trying to do is related or not (shrug).

I was just trying out several old programs to see what works and what doesn't.

This one is text only - just reading the screen memory so it can be restored after closing a pop up selection box (Dos style).

Bottom line - anything platform specific is going to fail.

Def Seg? On a Mac? I think that is probably sacrilegious. Segments? We ain't got no stinkin' segments!

I did play with the long file names. The FBC stuff worked first time right outta the box. Too cool!

But to make old programs work with the new stuff means total conversion of the old code to the new standards. They don't mix and match.

Still, it does look like a very good system for BASIC programming. And the in-line assembly means I can do just about anything I can figure out how to do... I like that - a lot.

Thanks guys! It was a nice Christmas present...

Richard

The 3 gigahertz processor is impressive and the fan being only 1/2 a foot instead of 6 is notable too.

Hul