Hi again, Just to clarify ....
On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 2:15 PM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 6:27 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > > > Another thought: how outdated is this DOS version of perl? > > Our build of 5.8.8 (from DJGPP) is from 2008. Not quite, but close enough. Our build (at least the one I have on hand) is from 2007 while the copyright itself is from 2006. > For most basic things, I would greatly prefer AWK or Sed. > > I'm not aware of much in FreeDOS that would need Perl. (Devore's NoMySo does, > but few here seem to use it.) The full PERL588B.ZIP (from DJGPP 2.04 /beta/ ... ironically probably the exact same .ZIP in 2.05 /current/ nowadays, from a quick glance) that I have here unpacks to 39 MB. If you piecemeal unpack a few pieces individually, you can minimize that a lot. I was able to get Devore's NOMYSO working in only about 2 MB of space (hence omitting most of the 2000+ files). It still has a few bugs and is quite slow, but it mostly works. (The big advantage is converting implicit data sizes into explicit overrides and adjusting weird bracket displacement syntax. It doesn't handle "Assume" seg overrides at all, though.) I also, years ago, found yet another Befunge-93 interpreter written in Perl (IIRC, by a guy nicknamed mtve). Not only did I put it inside a self-contained .BAT (yes, you can do that), but I also slightly adjusted it (one syntax change) so that it would work even on ancient 5.005 (which was much smaller). (IIRC, 5.005 was just before 5.6.) Just FYI in case anybody finds that interesting. It's almost a shame that nobody knows or uses such things anymore. There's a lot of lost art lying around in computing. Anyways, I still prefer Sed or AWK. I actually wrote a (very flawed) AWK script yesterday to auto-adjust implicit data sizes. Previously I was just doing a functional but very simplistic kludge in Sed (two passes, temporary files). I was really trying (with AWK) to do it all in one pass in RAM, but so far I've only half succeeded. But it does work (mostly). Actually, even that isn't needed with Sed if the assembler supports EQU or %define (it can be written to a separate include file), but some assemblers don't (or are buggy). Yeah, there are no quick fixes for difficult problems, and old code often needs a lot of work. I'm just trying to get a better understanding of the basics. No miracles performed here. Still, it's cool. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
