Hi, On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 11:21 AM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > > > In other words, you probably can't talk about "Turbo Pascal" proper, > > only the dialect as used in either GPC or FPC or p2c. They don't want > > you promoting or pointing people to proprietary software. > > Correct, you shouldn't write about proprietary software for > Opensource.com. One exception is if you're writing about "open source > alternatives to proprietary software." So writing a "(Free)DOS > programming with Pascal" article that uses FreePascal is great; a > Pascal article that uses TurboPascal would probably get rejected.
>From a practical standpoint, the only "Turbo Pascal for DOS" that is readily available anymore is "old 5.5" (freeware, non-redistributable). So it's not even the full TP 7 dialect. So you do get actual improvements and newer features in other compilers with their "turbo" dialect (e.g. FPC). Even ignoring FPC (which is wonderful), the "de facto" Pascal standard long ago was "turbo" in lieu of either of the "official" standards (ISO 7185, 10206). Even Niklaus Wirth himself (whose birthday is today!) long ago jumped ship to other languages (e.g. Oberon-07). Heck, Delphi is 28 years old as of yesterday! (Quoting Marco Cantu): "As a commenter wrote, Delphi was VB done right. With the original native VB long abandoned by Microsoft, and VB.NET 'nearly frozen', Delphi has kept more steam and has remained a viable option over the years." [FPC supports a large subset of Delphi.] So why use old dialects at all? Part of it is just a challenge to see if it can be done. Part of it is just minimalism or reducing complexity or avoiding unnecessary modern features. It's also just for strict compatibility (rarely needed but still valid). A newer language or toolset doesn't necessarily share all the advantages of the older one. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. > > I don't think they are sympathetic to the history of QB, PDS, VBDOS. > > (Steve Nikolas is the resident BASIC expert around here.) > > "History of programming" articles can be okay, but I'd guess the > editors would look for the article to turn to open source options. > That's what I'd look for, if I read the article. For example, an > article about the history of BASIC might highlight a few variants like > AppleSoft BASIC, BASICA, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC/QBASIC, and FreeBASIC. > Most of those are proprietary; GW-BASIC was made open source a few > years ago, and FreeBASIC is GNU GPL. As a suggestion: You might make > the focus into something like "[most] programs written for an earlier > BASIC should work fine on a later BASIC, and that's the cool thing > about BASIC backwards compatibility .. it's just BASIC." Or something > like that. I am not an editor on the site, but my guess is they would > like that. You can always email the editors to ask them. FreeBASIC started in 2004 written in VBDOS (I think??) until it was able to compile itself. The whole PDS suite was mainly about supporting both DOS and OS/2 (until IBM and MS parted ways). Visual BASIC never had any further DOS releases and focused more on Windows (and not OS/2 either). The famous "QBASIC" interpreter was originally included in MS-DOS 5 (and supposedly others like OS/2 and NT). I don't even know if modern Windows includes VBScript anymore. FreeBASIC does have support for "REM $lang qb", but it's incomplete. Having said that, I did write a few scripts that intentionally work (and were tested) under both. So that is okay, as long as it runs on both. The advantage would be that deploying a script is easy if everyone already has one or the other. Later versions of PC-DOS included REXX instead of QBASIC, also a cool language. I've written some scripts that were adjusted to run on various REXX interpreters too (not as easy as it sounds!). So, again, as long as it (also) runs on Regina, it's okay. This is the (hypothetical) advantage of "standards". But in reality it takes modularity, preprocessor, patches, and other fixes due to bugs or omissions or incompatible dialects. But non-portability can (mostly) be mitigated with a little extra work. (But never assume it works everywhere until you test it! Even AWK or Sed can have that problem.) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
