[vox] History of Linux

[Bill Kendrick]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 02:42:21PM -0700, Brian E. Lavender wrote:
<snip>
> Most computer science classes 30 years ago introduced programming using
> Pascal. It's a great language for writing code and in many ways just
> makes more scents! It influenced Ada and Eiffel. Come to think of it,
> the "Make with Ada" competition is going now!

I took a class on Pascal on Apple IIs back in the early 90s at my
high school.  (Not _quite_ 30 years ago, but... yikes!)

It was clunky, but it was an eye-opener, after almost a decade of
playing around with BASIC on my Atari.  I didn't have anything higher-level
to use at home at the time, but I decided I liked some of the structures
that I saw in Pascal -- as well as in C code I'd see for the "bigger" computers
(Atari ST and Amiga) in computer magazines -- and ended up trying to recreate
those concepts _in_ BASIC.

Basically (er, no pun), I wrote a BASIC program that would slurp in
a text file with code written in my 'extended BASIC' kind of language,
and then spit out _actual_ BASIC.

For example, something like:

  WHILE A<10
    PRINT A
    A=A+1
  WEND

Would become something along the lines of:

  10 IF A>=10 THEN GOTO 50
  20   PRINT A
  30   A=A+1
  40 GOTO 10
  50 REM WEND

...or something.  (I've got the disk in my closet, and can probably
still read it, but... not worth the effort right now :) )


Later (but still mid-90s) I picked up "Action!", a very nice integrated
editor & compiler on a cartridge (ROM!) that compiled directly to
6502 machine language.  The syntax is apparently similar to ALGOL
(which, Wikipedia reminds me, "was designed to avoid some of the
perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other
programming languages, including [...] Pascal, and C". :^) )

(For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language) )


And in keeping this on topic, good ol' Action!'s own assembly language
source code was released under the GNU GPL a few years ago!

And these days, there are some very 6502 nice cross-assemblers, and I've
seen a few attempts to recreate Action! as a cross-compiler on modern systems.
If/when that ever happens, I'll probably give up trying to make cc65 work
for me.

(And to convert that on-topic topic back to an Atari topic, "cc65,"
the open source 6502 cross-compiler for Un*x and other platforms that
people use to make games on Nintendo NES and Commodore 64 & such, these days,
actually started life as a compiler that ran on the Atari 8-bits. :) )


All's I'm saying is, all this computer science stuff is intertwined even
more than one might expect!

-bill!