[Coco] Perl PL for OS/9

[William Schaub]

Gene Heskett wrote:
>> discussion should be generalized to include modern compilers on newer
>> architectures generating intermediate/assembly code for older
>> architectures as well. However, I ONLY have time to learn ONE language now
>> and into the foreseeable future. TIA
>>     
> . Maybe, this
>
> Then I think, since you asked about scripting, that something in the way of 
> an expansion of the os9 shell needs to be done.  However, even that is 
> written in assembly AFAIK.  It does need help, there are many things bash can 
> do that shell can't.  Were I needing such as you've outlined, I think I'd 
> start with assembly, and build shell up to what you think you can use.  But I 
> think I'd stop when it got up to about 14k in size.  System memory is in 
> relatively short supply even on my 2 megabyte of ram coco3 and that would 
> exacerbate the problem I believe.
>
> OTOH, I just checked bash here, on a 32 bit F10 box.  Its quite large:
>
> [root at coyote doc]# ls -l /bin/bash
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 756360 2008-12-15 06:04 /bin/bash
>
> No way that could be shrunk enough to work on the coco even if built on an 8 
> bit machine.
>
>   
bash is a big bloated mess. however I bet you could get the original 
Version 7 UNIX shell to work. the original sources are still available 
The PDP-11 didn't have a whole lot of ram to work with either (although 
it was still a heck of a lot nicer than a coco for sure)