Getting BASIC programs compiled in Puppy?

[phat7]

On re-reading I see you have a lot in common with the ideals of the late contributer to the forum, learnhow2code.

The same unique posting format. Startling similarities indeed

[nosystemdthanks]

The same unique posting format.

considering we both claim to be the author of fig, its reasonable to assume we are the same person. there was a mixup with me and robert storey-- which i find absurd, storey was extremely helpful when i emailed him and knew more about a number of topics than i do. no one who knew him would mix us up. if you go to the distrowatch article that led to this confusion, its entirely clear he was not claiming authorship of the article. he only wrote under his name, and the article was attributed to me. it doesnt get much clearer than that.

its possible i have lh2c in the basement, or that he retired and had me take over like the dread pirate roberts, but either way ive spent the time since 2016 remixing distros using what i originally called "refrachtahrpup/mkrefpup."

it was someone from this forum that recommended changing the name of refractahrpup-- which i was pretty indifferent about or i would have chosen a less awful name the first time.

glad you liked the end of the distro post. like most of the things i write, i hope the ideas are interesting but they often describe things that are already happening or being implemented to some degree-- and the direction those things could move. i think there will be (and is) increasing amounts of automation in distro development, for one. when i was a kid, i thought it would be so much more practical if we put files on chips instead of floppy disks, but obviously that was a silly idea no one was ever going to go for.

[Puppyt]

OK so I'm also going to deflect very briefly from the original purpose of the thread but I will loop back to it soon (no pun intended).
nosystemdthanks I only glance off various events writings on the state and nature of the Puppy Programming thread and its authors - so really any actual dot-joining I make is more in the style of Arthur Dent than Dirk Gently... but nevertheless your manuscript had me referencing parallels I have been long considering in the natural world. Firstly though - I feel you should define your abbreviations throughout (e.g., EEE) for us non- programming readership. Some of the examples you give are similarly esoteric to those not active in the field - a quick paragraph summary of those associated states-of-play would have been useful. But after sleeping on it I had a strong sense of your overall message. That is, you were not only philosophising on a natural progression of computing language that remains open-source (akin to the language we are communicating in now) and interacts with its instruments similarly, but that the education of such a language be effectively parallel to this. (Said poorly. I will get back to this.) How else do we inspire passive, monopolized consumers into becoming active integrators and creators? Brains are not computers of course. But what I was reading were some striking parallels with the concept of "Autopoesis" (self-organising) from neurobiologist philosophers Maturana and Varela. Life essentially defined as a dynamic loop interacting with its environment to preserve its functional and structural integrity (i.e., remain alive). Any aspect of that organism, sensory system, neuron - has the same 'drive' to protect its functional state within its respective "environ". So I was thinking that in terms of your argument of Programming/Technology/Sociology Education - that the true importance of a program is not how well it interacts with instruments/devices, but how it has interacted with the organic pattern (human) that wants a given role to be performed. (Linking back to the "Coming software apocolypse" posts and concerns.)

Whew. Need my second coffee. Anyways to get back to the OT - if we follow the history of BASIC and proprietary derivatives we can see (?) an evolution of interactions with increasingly sophisticated environments/devices that it has fallen short - ultimately lacks flexibility. But perhaps there is still value in experiencing historical languages - especially those that enable novice programmers to "tinker". Smartphones (android at least) can run free DOS and BASIC environments - there is hope yet for us who want to feel involved and grow with (our) technological progress.

[nosystemdthanks]

cool stuff. i install dosbox on a regular basis, though i rarely run it. archive.org has an online emulator that lets you run dos programs in the browser.

dos is what i learned on, dos is related to how i found puppy in 2006. i was looking for a way to download monkey linux, which is similar to a way someone packaged puppy together with grub4dos. i wanted a gui version of pygmy linux-- which let you boot into it from the command line (or autoexec.bat) after loading windows 98.

that said, by 2011 i had exhausted most or all my uses for the dos environment. and running a programming environment in emulation had appeal, though it was limited. ultimately i wanted more to do similar tasks without emulation.

i think thats what most people want-- but, as long as there are people that want something else im in favour of them working to have what they want, unless it is available anyway. in that event, they can simply enjoy it.

and its not just that i want people to create their own software. i want people in general to understand the basics of programming, as the shortest route to really understanding computers. because it is a useful abstraction, as are applications, but one is an abstraction that keeps people mostly unaware of how things work-- and the other is a rudimentary understanding and familiarity with coding-- which is easy to teach if you make it simple but relevant.

when i spent years (literally decades) coding in basic, i knew if i found a language i wanted to replace it with that it would have at least a couple new features (the array handling in python is much nicer) and that coding would be easy without constantly looking up syntax. i knew that it wouldnt waste my time with unnecessary rules (necessary rules are one thing, but there are definitely unnecessary rules.)

i knew id have the same experience where id set out to code something, and expect it to take this many hours, only to find it working before i expected it to be ready. that happened with basic. python really is amazing.

but i get tired of all the parentheses and in basic, the dollar signs. i get tired of reimplementing trivial constructs in basic that are native and single-line efforts in python. i got tired of static typing-- in theory i like weak typing like js and bash have though in practice, dynamic/strong typing is what i like most.

then again i like that basic is mostly not case sensitive, and although python taught me to love indentation-- i like the option of not using that, especially when posting code snippets. i also prefer to put bash in strings to be used by the shell command-- because i get tired of all the ways bash can complicate that task, and i can work around it in a way that requires less tweaking to get things right.

people get the wrong ideas when they think about new languages. you can create them accidentally while parsing increasinly elaborate config files, and some of the most wildly successful languages are not created with any intention of being broadly useful or powerful or state of the art. python was intended as something to tinker with over the holiday season. creating languages is fun if you demand simplicity and stay devoted to that goal.

but i build most of the languages ive designed on top of python. it comes down to the legacy of basic-- if you had an operating system made of mostly python-based tools, anyone could learn to tweak those and they could be more cross-compatible than probably any other toolsets.

you can do that with any other language, except more tediously with javascript. basic doesnt have the libraries, modern versions of basic show their ties to more complicated languages like c and c++ and so do the problems that arise from them. unless you try to do everything with python 3, python wont do that. i think pypy will prove to be the best implementation, because they will support python 2 longer than the python foundation will.

python can be made friendlier, more easily than basic can at this point. and i want to have languages that are tailored to more general use, while modern versions of basic lend themselves most readily to building video games-- which is harder work and not easier. in the gaming industry meanwhile, things are far more abstract and less language specific. you create designs, which are abstracted to target multiple languages and platforms.

in short, basic is now a harder, more tedious way to learn to code-- which is why after more than 20 years i finally stopped enjoying it (i tried > 30 dialects, i reviewed the features of > 50 or more, which only led me to js and python. js is a real pain, but powerful.)

running old basic programs? we have the tools for that. youre probably better off with qb64 than fb for that purpose.

perhaps there is still value in experiencing historical languages - especially those that enable novice programmers to "tinker".

very much-- though since every basic ends up being more tedious, i think the best reason to review older languages is to try to bring the simplicity forward into newer examples. i used basic-like command names because i like them and i think theyre easy to type and use. though i have tried replacing "pset" with "dot" or "dots" before. ive also experimented with creating a command shell that is easier to learn. but bash is more powerful.

[Puppyt]

I really appreciate your experience on the matter nosystemdthanks. Did you formalise your comparisons of BASIC versions in any way? And you think q64 might be a better way to reinvigorate auld structured and unstructured games/programs rather than a BaCon-yad route to convert the code into tiny modern apps? Thinking about my original purpose of the thread I guess I wanted a project/environment/hobby I could work on to create something while retaining my original sense of discipline - without having to learn the foibles of a "new" computer language. But your insights have encouraged me to look seriously at supplanting my interest with Python. Unfortunately, no hobby-time for me

In a related project I have been writing a paper related to the evolution of the Western alphabet. Current thinking is that many of the modern letters were based on the hieroglyphics (literally "sacred text") of the Ancient Egyptians. They were a combination of pictograms/logograms depicting entire concepts, syllables and even a few phoneme sounds - the latter being the basis for the modern alphabet system. However, over time the hieroglyphs expanded from about 200 commonly-used symbols that basically everyone could read - to over 6000 that only the scribes and priests had a working knowledge of. They preserved their own self-importance by bamboozling everyone else - the original "knowledge economy"? I guess I am wary of modern computer languages which might similarly work to alienate the common folk with more esoteric functions and constructs... or maybe I'm just being a neophyte. Dunno.

[nosystemdthanks]

Did you formalise your comparisons of BASIC versions in any way?

that would be an awesome endeavour. i dont think it will ever happen (unless an ai is tasked with it) because the people most interested in formalising that sort of task wouldnt be interested in an objective measure of the merits.

i would, but for my evaluations i would need to cross reference decades of research around usability and human psychology to get the results that mean the most to me. instead, i just went for the more conventional trial-and-error/iterative approach. its cheaper, and better yet its not limited to existing solutions.

short version: most people just want to convince you to use their own solution. i encourage (and teach) people to create their own solutions to this, but i am happy to provide my example(s) for inspirations.

i prefer fig, but for just one person i created a new dialect based on fig, called rose. one of the cool things about rose is that it marries the ordered python list with the dictionary-- and it is based on the dictionary, thus taking in all of its advantages, but when you use the array features in an ordered fashion you lose a bit of speed. the advantage is that you only have to learn one type of array to get the benefits of two. for beginners i think this is cool.

And you think q64 might be a better way to reinvigorate auld structured and unstructured games/programs rather than a BaCon-yad route to convert the code into tiny modern apps?

for most people, sure. if you prefer bacon for some reason, use that. ive used yad before, its a good tool. qb64 would probably get you to a result with less effort, but my experience with bacon is limited. you might find a better quality result doing it your way. but do note i was comparing qb64 to fb, not to bacon.

I guess I wanted a project/environment/hobby I could work on to create something while retaining my original sense of discipline - without having to learn the foibles of a "new" computer language.

i assumed so. i doubt anyone is going to go farther than qb64 for compatibility-- though be sure you look at pc-basic too: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/

because for very old stuff, it is a full-featured basica interpreter/emulator.

i tried adding features once. pc-basic isnt just an interpreter, it is a full-on retrocomputing experience. the way its designed is intended to replicate the same environment for basic programs-- with the same limitations, and it is meticulously implemented in a way that makes it incredibly tedious to work around. at least thats what i found. i was able to change screen 9 (gw-basic had no screen 12, that was a qb mode) to be higher resolution.

But your insights have encouraged me to look seriously at supplanting my interest with Python. Unfortunately, no hobby-time for me

i hear you.

In a related project I have been writing a paper related to the evolution of the Western alphabet. Current thinking is that many of the modern letters were based on the hieroglyphics (literally "sacred text") of the Ancient Egyptians. They were a combination of pictograms/logograms depicting entire concepts, syllables and even a few phoneme sounds - the latter being the basis for the modern alphabet system. However, over time the hieroglyphs expanded from about 200 commonly-used symbols that basically everyone could read - to over 6000 that only the scribes and priests had a working knowledge of. They preserved their own self-importance by bamboozling everyone else - the original "knowledge economy"?

we are lucky we dont have proprietary alphabets today. the dewey decimal system used by libraries is under copyright, and very expensive. we could make a free version sure, but it would be unfamiliar, so theres a library using 20th century (technically 19th century) technology with microsoft/apple-like "lock-in."

i was confused by the part about the alphabet, i thought it was common knowledge (from school, before wikipedia existed) that we got our letters from the phoenicians. but going to wikipedia for more information (theyve never been wrong about anything before, heh) i guess i learned something today, thanks:

The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet,[3] which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it from a true alphabet). In turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script[4] influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended.

I guess I am wary of modern computer languages which might similarly work to alienate the common folk with more esoteric functions and constructs... or maybe I'm just being a neophyte. Dunno.

its very tedious work to teach something esoteric to everyone. i was interested in python partly because basic no longer held the ground it did with beginners. it has features i always wanted in basic-- multitype arrays, dynamic typing, but i didnt want "fancy" i just wanted "easier."

problem is, python has some features that are easier to use than basic-- and basic has some that are easier than python.

i wanted the best of both. but these languages that have everything in the Out house sink-- they do take a little of the old fun out of it.

which is why i used < 100 commands, made the very most of those, and made it expandable via a second language-- just like basic did in the 80s.

i really wanted the locate and color commands back though. pity that inkey$ is such a pain to implement from python, and platform-specific too. input$(1) can be implemented in puppy/debian/arch/etc by using read with arrshell, at least for most uses. its not a built-in because all the other features are cross platform.

[puppy_apprentice]

PC-BASIC

A free, cross-platform emulator for the GW-BASIC family of interpreters.

PC-BASIC is a free, cross-platform interpreter for GW-BASIC, Advanced BASIC (BASICA), PCjr Cartridge Basic and Tandy 1000 GWBASIC.
It interprets these BASIC dialects with a high degree of accuracy, aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility.
PC-BASIC emulates the most common video and audio hardware on which these BASICs used to run.
PC-BASIC runs plain-text, tokenised and protected .BAS files.
It implements floating-point arithmetic in the Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) and can therefore
read and write binary data files created by GW-BASIC.

PC-BASIC is free and open source software released under the GPL version 3.

http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/



It is written in Python so maybe nosystemdthanks will be curious how it works.

[nosystemdthanks]

It is written in Python so maybe nosystemdthanks will be curious how it works.

ive already spent loads of time with the sourcecode. at the top of this page i said to puppyt,

i assumed so. i doubt anyone is going to go farther than qb64 for compatibility-- though be sure you look at pc-basic too: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/

because for very old stuff, it is a full-featured basica interpreter/emulator.

i tried adding features once. pc-basic isnt just an interpreter, it is a full-on retrocomputing experience. the way its designed is intended to replicate the same environment for basic programs-- with the same limitations, and it is meticulously implemented in a way that makes it incredibly tedious to work around. at least thats what i found. i was able to change screen 9 (gw-basic had no screen 12, that was a qb mode) to be higher resolution.

[puppy_apprentice]

Ok. I've missed this.

[rockedge]

I like DosBox with QuickBasic 4.5....works really well.

Runs almost every program I wrote for QB4.5 all those years ago..plus DosBox runs all those DOS games and software as well. Also installed the qbasic interpreter and that worked great for some of the older style basic like with line numbers....

https://www.dosbox.com/

[zzz000abc]

Hi friends,
after going through the discussion on best suitable basic for puppy I thought it's better to put my views on this topic.
I found just basic http://www.justbasic.com/jb20setup.exe
is simple and complete. you can use it without any problems once you install wine.I am using it on puppy for years without any problems.

Recently a few days ago and I found FreeBasic linux version.It is more interesting and powerful with number of external libraries.I was able to write few short programs within a couple of days.
Now I am planning to add a GUI to blue tooth streaming pet shown herehttp://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=97456.

you can download FreeBasic herehttps://sourceforge.net/projects/fbc/files

[6502coder]

I have posted before about the free VintageBasic BASIC interpreter:
http://www.vintage-basic.net
and I was surprised at the (relative) amount of interest in my conversions
of two classic BASIC programs to VintageBasic:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 120#962120

This time I'm posting a VintageBasic version of the board game "Dodgem."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgem
It should run with little or no further tweaking on any BASIC interpreter
that supports the old-school line-numbered BASIC.
Edit: confirmed works fine with Bywater BASIC. Chipmunk not so much:
apparently Chipmunk doesn't implement the ASC() function.

My starting point was the version printed in the book "More BASIC Computer
Games" by David Ahl. I found a typo-ridden OCR-generated copy of the
listing online, fixed the typos, rewrote the game instructions, added comments
and indentation to make the spaghetti-code somewhat easier to follow,
and fixed a couple of apparent bugs. Nonetheless, if you exclude the game
instructions, my version is clearly nearly the same as the original.
You are free to do what you like with my version, but of course the original
program listing is presumably covered by the copyright on the book, so....

Currently, the Linux binary for the VintageBasic interpreter is available in
64-bit only, but I have the 32-bit binary I downloaded back in July 2017 and
in fact that is what I used for this project. If you're interested in the 32-bit
binary, just PM me. I don't see a huge problem with me doing this given that
the source is open-source (BSD license) and posted publicly online for anyone
to grab and compile themselves, although apparently you need to have
Haskell installed. Edit: No worries, I'm good. I read the license and
redistribution is OK as long as I include the licensing document.

[Puppyt]

Hi 6502coder - thanks so much for posting this! I regret that I haven't been notified of new posts to this thread, just caught it using "View posts since last visit" whenever I am procrastinating. Regret I won't be able to test this for a while - thanks for your dedication to the Ahl volume(s), by the way. I think I have an archive somewhere of BAS games I have collected over the years, meaning to work through them at some stage but alas - real life issues... Cheers

[6502coder]

Hi Puppyt,

Understood! I only took on this little project because it's been a dreary rainy day with a big snowstorm coming, making power iffy, and I needed something I could do on an ancient laptop powered off a small UPS. This fit the bill. To be honest I haven't done anything else with BASIC since I posed that How-To on making BASIC programs click-to-run.

Cheers!

[6502coder]

The question of the relative merits of various BASICs having been broached earlier
in this thread, I humbly offer my own evaluations, on the off chance they might
be useful to others.

The question "Which is best?" immediately begs the question, "For what?"
Hence I want to make it clear that my own requirements are probably very
different from Puppyt's.

My own interest is limited to BASIC interpreters that support the old-school
line-numbered style BASIC, for the purpose of implementing classic BASIC
programs from the 1980s--or new programs in that style.

The only graphics capabilities I need are what can be drawn on a terminal.
Color would be nice but monochrome is sufficient. The only user-input device
I need to have supported is a keyboard.

I want an interpreted BASIC, preferably in the form of a single Linux executable
with no dependencies beyond the most basic, standard libraries that any
Puppy would have by default. I need it to run on 32-bit hardware.

If I'm not willing to tolerate having to install additional libs, you can
guess what my attitude is to running anything in WINE or DOSBox. As they say
back in Texas where I used to reside, "That dog don't hunt."

I am explicitly NOT interested in modern, structured BASIC -- my needs for a
simple structured language to implement simple games are fully met by
Javascript, as exemplified by the game I wrote a while back for the
Puppy Newsletter. For fancier stuff I use Python and Tk/Tcl.

I am also NOT interested in being able to compile BASIC programs into
standalone Linux executables. So I have no interest in FreeBASIC or BaCon.

So with those stipulations in mind, and having looked at some of the BASICs
mentioned in this thread, here are my conclusions so far.

Bywater BASIC is my first choice. It has the ability to implement a number of
different dialects of BASIC, which eases the task of getting ancient classic
programs running. The interpreter is standalone and "only" about 610 KB,
which although absurdly enormous compared to the 8 KB Atari BASIC and 16-32 KB
Microsoft BASICs of the good old days, is apparently not bad for a Linux BASIC.
Bywater BASIC also has the merit of having been under development for a VERY
long time (since at least 1993), so one can hope it has relatively few bugs.

VintageBASIC is a close second. It does everything I need. The interpreter
is about 1 MB. However, Bywater BASIC can grok the VintageBASIC dialect, so
that gives Bywater an edge.

SmallBASIC is also about 1 MB, but the dependency on SDL libs is a show-stopper.
Also, development for the 32-bit version apparently ceased in 2017.

Chipmunk BASIC is admirably small at about 196 KB, but alas is missing fundamental
stuff like the ASC() function. No wonder it's so small...

FreeBASIC I've already mentioned as disqualified because it's a compiler, and
I want an interpreter. Moreover, the executable is a pudgy 1.9 MB --
3 times the size of the Bywater BASIC executable.

These are MY opinions based on MY requirements, so no offense to
fans of the BASICs I have rejected. Your mileage will no doubt vary.

[6502coder]

I uploaded a new version of Dodgem.vbas, posted above.
This improves the game by making the computer's moves less predictable.

[Puppyt]

Cheers again 6502coder - you are a man after my own heart Much appreciated views on your BASIC approach, and might I add that the 80's -vintage BASIC programmes that Usborne Press gave out online links for are still active, if you wanted motivation

Although we are of similar vintage and I guess inclination, I had to search up on "compilers versus interpreters", to ensure I was reading from the right pages. https://www.programiz.com/article/diffe ... nterpreter and Here https://www.thecrazyprogrammer.com/2014 ... reter.html sorted me out with dot-points. Yay. And then I had to do a quick trawl to update my memory banks to find this neat summary of free (and current?) BASICS https://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/basic.shtml.
Although, I like where rockedge was going earlier with Geany/BaCon, and the compilation of some naff stand-alone applications to replace the standard "Fun" selection in official Puppy lines seems like a cause I could take up... Dammit - back to the grindstone. Cheers again

[off-stage can be heard singing "I'm a grind stone cowboy..." Badly.]

[6502coder]

Here's another BASIC program for your retro-amusement. The "L-Game" appeared in David Ahl's 1979 book "More BASIC Computer Games." I've done a completely new implementation in Bywater BASIC, which I've settled on as the best BASIC for my purposes. The program should run in most line-numbered BASICs with little or no modification.

The zip file contains the BASIC program, "LGame.wbas", and a "Readme.txt"; both are plain text files.