On 5/22/2020 5:17 AM, Jim Hall wrote:
As for GW-BASIC, FreeDOS already includes other BASIC interpreters and
compilers with equivalent or better functionality, so I don't know
that we need to add GW-BASIC. I'm not a BASIC programmer, so I'm open
to suggestion on this. There's pros and cons either way (a big pro is
compatibility, a big con is I suspect no one has GW-BASIC files laying
around).
Well, BW-BASIC (which you are likely eluding to) is more an excuse of a
BASIC interpreter. And you would be surprised how much of GW-BASIC
source code is still out there.
But either way, nice to know it's there. And it should be an
interesting experiment for someone to get this to assemble using open
tools.
I had started as a pet project of mine a work alike clone of GW-BASIC
but got stuck with a couple of internals, like the MBF floating point
format used by the early M# programming languages, so I hope that this
released code can shed some light on this things that got me stuck so I
can easier continue on my project. After all it has been released for
educational purposes... ;-)
But unfortunately, I just recently started to work on a project that is
a bit of a complement to your "programming in C" videos you put out as
well have volunteered for a part-time job at a local food bank/soup
kitchen through the end of June, so I will see how much time I can find
for this before the lockdown around here really get lifted and real work
(for a living) starts again...
I wonder if they'll release QuickBasic as open source. That would be
REALLY interesting!
That might be debatable... ;-)
Overall, it's good to see Microsoft doing this. Especially so because
of the company president last week saying that he now recognizes
Microsoft was on the wrong side of history on open source. Seems like
they really do recognize the importance of open source and are taking
steps to be more open (they've released other things as open source
via GitHub that hasn't hit the news)
Don't bet your farm on this. All that they have released so far are
always the oldest versions of everything (same for DOS and Windows too),
which have very little practical use, so I see this rather as a teasing
token than a real change in policy...
Ralf
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