At 04:11 PM 7/26/2011, Rugxulo wrote: >It's just hard to imagine why they would ever include LINK and EXE2BIN >when nothing comes with DOS that can use them. BASICA/GW-BASIC surely >didn't. I don't know, I'm not as savvy as some people here (Ralf?).
Well, as you asked... ;-) EXE2BIN and LINK where indeed include for quite a while as not every compiler out there back then included it's own linker and specifically some of the Microsoft compiler itself. A BASIC interpreter like BASICA/GWBASIC certainly did not need either of them. And IMHO, these are two tools that do not need to be included in a "basic" release of FreeDOS, those are things that should be however made available in an "developer" add-on or what ever you want to call it... > > Other commands which were dropped by the 6.22 era, or at least relegated to > > a separate download/purchase, were ASSIGN (MS-DOS 6), BACKUP (MS-DOS 6 and > > PC-DOS 6, although MS-DOS 6.21 - but not 6.22, again - has it in > base and PC > > DOS 7 also has it in base), JOIN (MS-DOS 6), MIRROR (made redundant with > > updates to FORMAT in DOS 6?), MSHERC (only used by QBASIC, QuickBasic and > > Visual Basic anyway), PRINTER.SYS (MS-DOS 6 and PC-DOS 7) and RECOVER > > (MS-DOS 6 and PC DOS 7). > >What kinda bothers me about all these changes is that no suitable >replacement is available. Sure, /olddos/ has QBASIC, but later >versions didn't have even that. I don't know, it's weird. As far as the inclusion of a BASIC interpreter goes, the reasoning might very likely have been that the number of user actually writing their own BASIC programs compared to the number of overall users had dropped significantly. And pretty much all commercial software for DOS by that time were delivered in form of compiled programs, while in the early days, quite a number of software products were delivered as BASIC interpreter source files (hence the "protection" option when saving BASICA/GW-BASIC files). > My(uninformed, weak) guess is that they expected VBscript to replace >that, but who knows. (God help anybody bothering with PowerShell, that >syntax looks horrible! But hey, the advantage is that it comes >installed by default. Unfortunately, you have to deal with the v1, v2, >upcoming v3 [??] issue, which is bad. Bah, annoying.) That's all Windows stuff that shouldn't concern in here... >In other words, I understand wanting to be compatible, but I consider >BWBASIC (even if weak) or AWK to be better than nothing and at least a >semi-familiar scripting tool for people using FreeDOS. At least, those >would be more useful than EXE2BIN (to me), but perhaps some of us >think DEBUG already covers all that. "If it can't be done in DEBUG, >it's can't be done at all." ;-) But seriously, we're not going to >win a lot of fans telling them "use DEBUG", so we should consider >including Guenther's 16-bit AWK compile (though a newer version >apparently came out two months ago, need to e-mail him!!). I would not call BWBASIC "weak" but including it would give users a "basic" scripting tool which goes beyond the DOS batch scripting. Don't know what AWK has to do with either BWBASIC, EXE2BIN or DEBUG, but awk is certainly not DOS and therefor should IMHO not be included in any "base" package... Seeing that there is so little "respect" for the old tools that made out DOS, I am not sure if I should pick up one of my projects I had started a few years back, a GW-BASIC clone, looks like there won't be much interest for this at least in here. Or even bother to put the finishing touches on BACKUP&RESTORE for that matter... :-( Ralf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Got Input? Slashdot Needs You. Take our quick survey online. Come on, we don't ask for help often. Plus, you'll get a chance to win $100 to spend on ThinkGeek. http://p.sf.net/sfu/slashdot-survey _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
