On Wed, 22 Jan 2025, Liam Proven via Freedos-devel wrote:
On Tue, 21 Jan 2025 at 16:02, Steve Nickolas <usots...@buric.co> wrote:
While it's easy as cake to do UIs with VBDOS, there's no way to port to
anything else.
That makes sense, yes.
What I do not know, but that Jacob's comments imply, is this:
* Did VBDOS contain a full BASIC compiler? Can it build standalone EXEs?
* If it did, can you write and compile code that will also be
compatible with QB and the PDS?
Yes, and it's 100% backward compatible with QBX/PDS 7.1.
Whereas he said it would build with the PDS and I suggested that if
his code is plain QucikBASIC-style BASIC and a bit of TurboPascal,
then he could just port that to FBC + FPC and have something with a
100% FOSS toolchain.
That's a very different proposition, right?
Yeah. I was talking more like a 1:1 rewrite from QBX to C, as opposed to
going to something like FreeBASIC or QB64, but the latter's certainly an
option.
I mean I built apps with QB 4.5 in the 1980s. If I could find the
media, I could port them to FBC. I would not be competent to rewrite
them in C in any C tool, no matter how clever, any more than I could
rewrite them in Lisp.
I could have the wrong message here but I am proposing a small
incremental change, while you seem to be proposing a complete rewrite.
More or less. QBX 7 is just a fancier version of QB 4.5, and VBDOS is
just a souped-up version of QBX 7 (to which a UI designer was added).
Some years ago I "created" an IPS patching tool by taking the original
one, which was written in Turbo Pascal, and simply converting the code
line by line into C. It was tedious but relatively trivial because the
languages basically do the same thing the same way with different syntax.
The same is more or less true of QuickBasic and C, but not as much as
Pascal and C. I also translated someone's text adventure more or less
line-by-line from GW-BASIC to Inform; that was a lot more challenging
because they're VERY different languages!
-uso.
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