Hi again, (Sorry in advance for the ramble.)
On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 2:06 PM Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 4:21 PM Steve Nickolas <usots...@buric.co> wrote: > > > > On Sat, 24 Oct 2020, Eric Auer wrote: > > > > > Regina REXX was not very small, while some others are small? Regina was (IIRC) compiled with Watt-32 due to external stack queue or whatever (rxqueue). You can almost certainly rebuild without it (I've done it), but I don't think the code supports 16-bit cpus. Even the smaller BRexx 16-bit build from 2003 isn't 8086-friendly (not sure, 186??), plus it's non-commercial only (not quite GPL). I also have a newer DJGPP build of BRexx from 2011, it's only like 110 kb. (It's always "interesting" testing code between various quasi-compatible interpreters. There's always dozens of caveats and dark corners and bugs. But it's amazing when portable code works!) Years ago, I put old Perl 4 [sic!] (16-bit) on my RUFFIDEA floppy just to have "something" scripting-wise, even though I never learned Perl. It was really only useful for "ztouch" (touch .gz from internal date, if found). Although I later wrote a sloppy and unportable (but functional!) version in REXX (both Regina and BRexx supported)! I never did finish writing a simpler C version (mktime(), utime()). I also lamented not just throwing REXX on floppy instead, but perhaps AWK (which?) would've been a better fit overall. I did recently rebuild old MAWK with Turbo C++ 1.01. UPX'd it's only 60 kb (compared to the family / bound DOS + OS/2 build which can't compress and is 160 kb). In some ways, MAWK is better than other ports (e.g. memory efficiency). With one script of mine, it works where our 16-bit (G.K.'s OW build, 2010) BWK's AWK doesn't. (32-bit builds of BWK work fine, as does 32-bit DJGPP Gawk. Again, it's always good to test on all available interpreters to weed out hidden bugs and non-portable issues.) > > Regina at least has some justification. Some later versions of PC DOS > > came with REXX. > > Yeah, it replaced QBASIC there. QBASIC only gets about 160 kb free memory (at best), no overlays nor extended memory, plus there's no modularity, not even include files (sadly). Even AWK and REXX have modularity via separate files, which is interesting and almost surprising. I actually dislike extreme modularity where you have too many separate files all over the place, but it can indeed be very useful. > REXX is a very cool language (ANSI standard, too, in 1996). It's almost too complex with all the (extra) features and extensions. But the base language is quite simple, almost BASIC-ish. Not as simple as Sed, but Sed is not a real programming language (no variables, no arithmetic). But, like I said, Regina is 32-bit (or 64-bit) only, AFAIK, so I don't think it'll build for 16-bit, which may annoy some of us purists. But it's still quite good. (Oh, there was CRX [Brian Marks' Compact Rexx] which was 16-bit, but I never delved too closely into it. I think it was buggy, but it was used for verifying standard code, back in the day. I forget the license, but IIRC it was written in MASM. I should take another look.) > Our Regina build (ANSI only, no OOP) is mine from 2012 using DJGPP. > Later sources had bugs that I never dug into that made it refuse to build. Trisquel had an even older Regina (3.6?)! Sheesh. Sometimes it's weird how packages are never updated, but I don't blame them (tedious). Anyways, you used to also be able to rebuild Regina via GCC/EMX, which I've done a few times (years ago) for fun. Not sure that's really "better" than DJGPP, though. Anyways, I've just been messing around with PSR Invaders (yet again), writing various scripts to convert MASMv4 syntax to various Free/libre assemblers (e.g. NASM, FASM, TinyASM). So that's my limited experience. Just FYI. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
