[Coco] CoCo TALK #18 an introduction to OS9

[L. Curtis Boyle]

> On Jul 25, 2017, at 10:27 AM, Wayne Campbell <asa.rand at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I was unable to attend the talk, but I watched the archived video. I found
> it interesting that no one really detailed the differences between OS-9
> L1/L2 and NitrOS-9 where command options is concerned. Specifically, dir e
> works  in the original OS-9, but in NitrOS-9 the command is dir -e. Another
> example is tmode. Turning page pause on or off in the original OS-9 uses
> the option pause (turn it on) or -pause (turn it off). In NitrOS-9, the
> same options are pau=1 (turn it on) and pau=0 (turn it off). These
> differences can make or break a program that uses any of the command
> modules. I realize that most commercial programs use system calls, not
> command modules, but there are some that use some of the commands. Many
> Basic09 programs are in this category, since it is easy to use them via the
> SHELL command. This may be considered minor to most OS-9 users, but I don't
> think it is at all trivial.
> 

I totally agree, and it was something that I wasn’t involved with (all of those changes
were done after I stopped working on NitrOS9. I believe the original reasoning was
multi-fold; 1) they wanted consistency (all options are -[opt]), 2) they wanted it to follow
OSK conventions to make the transition between the two easier, and 3) Some things
would break because the original options were not well thought out. (DIR is an example;
when we added wildcarding options, then DIR E could mean a filename E, not the user
requesting extended attributes). But more was broken than should have (particularly in
cases where only 2) applied.

> I laughed when Steve wrote his little Basic09 program. It works, and the
> code is "legal" and "valid" BASIC code, even in Basic09. However, no one
> told Steve that line numbers are only required in Basic09 if you are using
> a GOSUB, or a GOTO. I would like to discuss this in the next CoCo Talk, as
> I think a short course in Basic09 would be useful.

I think I briefly mentioned labels vs. procedure names, didn’t it? I thought I had. There
is a *lot* to cover for a whole OS, and the intent of this episode was just to introduce people
to what it is, and some of the things it can do. 
> 
> -- 
> Wayne
> 
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> 
> decode
> http://cococoding.com/wayne/
> 
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