[Coco] History repeats itself

Bill Pierce ooogalapasooo at aol.com
Sat Jan 9 20:50:00 EST 2016


James, I agree. Basic09 is a well written language and a lot of forethought was put into it. My only complaint with the Coco OS9 Basic09 was speed. Had they made Basic09 compile into ML code, it would've awesome (this could be done). This influenced my choice of using C over Basic09 when I started my latest projects... another well written language. Yes, the OS9 C compiler had a few bugs... actually, most of the bugs were library/system oriented and could/have (??) been fixed.
When working with graphics screens, Basic09 is really just too slow. Direct machine language system calls are just so much faster.

 Ya gotta luv OS-9 :-)

 


Bill Pierce
"Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won't stop going, no way to slow down!" - Ian Anderson - Jethro Tull

 

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-----Original Message-----
From: James Jones <jejones3141 at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sat, Jan 9, 2016 8:35 pm
Subject: [Coco] History repeats itself

Going through old documents, I found something I wrote as a followup to anarticle in 268'm by Aaron Banerjee about recursion and recursionelimination. I also looked at the the eight queens problem, but, save forone program at the very end, the code is in BASIC09.I don't remember whether I ever submitted the followup to 268'm, or whetherit was ever printed. I'm rewriting it for clarity and to improve theformatting from the listing I have (and so I can toss the printout!), andduring the rewrite, I noticed one thing:In a procedure that included EXITIF statements, I did not originally followthe indentation that BASIC09 imposes on its source listings.In the revision, I will keep to the way BASIC09 does it, because I knowbetter now.Recently, I've taken up the Go programming language. Its designers,including Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, wanted to avoid all the bikesheddingand hoohah and holy wars about code layout that afflicts some programminglanguages. The gofmt program establishes a layout standard that does so,and means Go programmers don't have to adapt to a new layout conventionwhen moving from place to place or project to project.I appreciate the wisdom of that choice, and my respect for the peopleresponsible for BASIC09, at least some of whom I had the honor of workingwith at Microware, is that much higher because they realized it was a goodchoice... almost *three decades* before Go.-- Coco mailing listCoco at maltedmedia.comhttps://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


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