[Coco] A bug in Basic09/RunB

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 08 December 2009, Wayne Campbell wrote:
>Gene,
>
>I see you were involved in solar tracking. How far back were you able to
> go? Were you able to establish cycles in lunar patterns in relation to the
> constellations and the position of the earth relative to the sun? Or were
> you just plotting lunar cycles? I'm not good enough at all the math to
> understand all of it, but I am interested in these things.

Basically, all it did was calculate according to lunar orbitals, the 
begin/end times for eclipses, solar or lunar.  For that it seemed to agree 
with reality pretty good.  IIRC I called it eclipse, and it may be on rtsi.  
If not, I can probably pull it up here and mail it to you.

As for how far back?  Till zero time in the Julian calendar, sometime in 
4713BC.

>As to "the Church", don't forget all the backward empires that have ruled
>this planet, and how they have held back progress in the name of their own
>gain.

True.

>Anyway, I understand that your need was greater than Basic09 could deliver.
>That is too bad. I believe that the way Basic09 was designed lends itself
> to the ablility to write comple code, with comple structures, that can
> perform at or near machine level speed, depending on the runtime module,
> or lack thereof.

I agree, generally, but once the c compiler was fixed, its output was faster.  
No interpretation involved.  With all the extras available for it, plus 
tossing c.prep on the trash heap & using c.prep19 (I did the last 3 versions 
of that FWIW) the c compiler was the powerhouse medium level programming tool 
of choice.  Or assembly.  That is my favorite in fact.

>Wayne
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net>
>To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
>Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 9:30 PM
>Subject: Re: [Coco] A bug in Basic09/RunB
>
>> On Monday 07 December 2009, Wayne Campbell wrote:
>>>Gene,
>>>
>>>I have looked at the structure of the REAL variables in Basic09 and OSK
>>>Basic. I compared them to each other, and to the definition of a float
>>> and a double in OS-9 C. From what I could tell, you can convert a
>>> Basic09 REAL
>>> to a C float, or a C double, by writing a subroutine in C. Did you ever
>>> try something like that?
>>
>> No, sorry Wayne.  I didn't see the utility for that application in doing
>> that
>> (checking lunar and solar eclipse times, in this case all the way back to
>> when Julian time breaks down completely in 4713 BC).  The real in b09
>> gives,
>> IIRC, about an 8 digit accuracy, whereas the C functions returned a 16 to
>> 17
>> digit accuracy.  All my C math for that was done in doubles and it seemed
>> to
>> agree with the historical times quoted for a couple hundred years back,
>> and
>> before that our timekeeping was a little fuzzy.  Real progress in that
>> dept.
>> was seriously hindered by the church who had an earth centric view of the
>> universe for at least a millenium, and men went slobbering to their
>> graves trying to make the math fit the facts they could see in the sky.
>>
>> Throwing away many decades(digits) of accuracy didn't seem like the thing
>> to
>> do at the time and all I was really doing was scratching an itch.
>> Climbing
>> the mountain because it was there so to speak. :)
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>
>> Juall's Law on Nice Guys:
>> Nice guys don't always finish last; sometimes they don't finish.
>> Sometimes they don't even get a chance to start!
>>
>> --
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>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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