|
I posted yesterday[^] about someone trying to learn with archaic tools, and that lead to finding QuickC for Dos on an abandonware site. I used to love that program!
And yes, it does run in DosBox.
Good things:
1) It's quick. Compilation is slower than I remember: for a really tiny app it spends a lot of time linking. But it loads and unloads practically instantly, much, much faster than VS.
2) The help is miles better than VS. Put it like this: it works. It could use some clarification - for example strcpy doesn't tell you which is the source and which the destination.
3) 16 bit integers!
Bad things:
1) I'd forgotten how damn limited C is! And how long it takes to get anything done with standard libraries instead of a framework doing it all behind the scenes. I want my classes back!
2) Only 21 lines of code on screen at any one time, and only 80 chars wide.
3) Copy and Paste are the old style "CTRL+INS" and "SHIFT+INS" (I'd forgotten those, but they still work in Win7!)
4) Um. That's it.
Perhaps I won't use it in anger again (I mean, when am I going to need a 16 bit application?) but it brings back a lot of memories - some of them good.
Anyone else remember this one?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
|
|
|
|
|
Loosing my control! Who's that someone? I had this on my mind yesterday, and today I am asking it!
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
|
|
|
|
|
Not saying. Unfair to embarrass people! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
|
|
|
|
|
And not fair not telling people and creating a suspense! 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
|
|
|
|
|
Chris Duncan and I used to have discussions on how good Turbo was in the day, light years ahead of uSoft.
Haven't seen any posts from him in a while, he must be busy.
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
There's a fine line between crazy and free spirited and it's usually a prescription.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
|
|
|
|
|
I remember the days of QuickC. Remember memory models and choosing your stack size?
After learning QuickBasic I felt like a real programmer learning QuickC.
Anyway, why didn't you just use cc or gcc? They are supported on modern OSes, easier to get now and they allow you to create extremely small -- limited -- C programs using stdlib.
Even RPi Rasbian
As a matter of fact, cc is installed on RPi's Raspbian distribution and it is very easy to use to get basic "hello world" going.
Just curious about why you didn't try gcc?
|
|
|
|
|
|
No Turbo Pascal? 
In college I had some classes that used VAX Pascal and others that used Turbo Pascal. My first introduction to C was with Whitesmith's C on a VAX, but later I got to use Turbo C, never Quick C.
All the C I did on paying jobs (1994-2002) was VAX or DEC C; none of those toy compilers. 
|
|
|
|
|
Yes, it was a nice IDE and amazing in those days of EDLIN and Vi.
|
|
|
|
|
I still "relapse" back to BRIEF emulation on Visual Slick Edit when I want to get something complicated done quickly in a text editor.
|
|
|
|
|
Oh yes, BRIEF was brilliant. You could even go 50 line mode. The macro language was the bomb. Wonder why they never moved over to a Windows version?
|
|
|
|
|
Oh yes. I liked the C extension language (although it was a little complex). And you could set up execution of a makefile, and ...
In some ways it's still better than the editor in VS - I really miss being able to open multiple files (or even multiple views on the same file) in the "edit space" of VS. I know you can open a "second window on the same file, but it's not the same... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
|
|
|
|
|
It is about our memory - I used to believe that C=64 was a supercomputer, until I run an emulator on my PC a few years ago... 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
|
|
|
|
|
I know what you mean. About thirty years ago, I was working on the VDT software for a Telecoms testing suite: there were four of us in the team doing the VDT, 10 or so doing the presentation stuff at the computer end (two mainframes: one DB, one test, with integration and control via the VDT), another dozen doing the hardware interfacing to the line test equipment. Gawd knows how many managers...
And the company it was all going to work for got a suggestion from a test department employee who was fed up with the manual system. Suggesting that a ZX Spectrum could handle it pretty easily, and he had a boy who could write the code... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
|
|
|
|
|
OriginalGriff wrote: Suggesting that a ZX Spectrum could handle it pretty easily
And he probably was right about that part... 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
|
|
|
|
|
My nostalgia[^] seems to be a lot better
I still enjoy those! (the actual good old ones, not (all of) the newer they have nowadays)...
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
|
|
|
|
|
“Ya remember...when we were kids...how good the jellied bugs used to taste?
And there were those long rolls of paper with food stains on them.
(You could get two thousand yards for a nickel!)
And then there were those little round hard things that would explode in your mouth and blow your lips off...
Oh! And the cold pork fat bars with the carpet tacks!
Boy, they don’t make stuff like that any more...
These days it’s all goddamn chemicals!”
(In remembrance of Bernard Kliban)
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
|
|
|
|
|
Dare I show my age here 
What about ANSI C & ISO Pascal on a 32k BBC Model B Micro, using Wordstar as the text editor!!
Now that was real programming... unless you want to get down and dirty with 6502 & Z80 hex opcodes.
Shawty
|
|
|
|
|
OriginalGriff wrote: 2) Only 21 lines of code on screen at any one time, and only 80 chars wide.
You can see 46 lines of code in 50-line mode (start with /h switch) ! No way round width limit. I still have this on my pc, runs under XP without needing Dosbox.
|
|
|
|
|
I remember it very well, I still use CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS for copying and pasting these days!
|
|
|
|
|
For example:
When you start typing a link into Chrome (like, the first letter even!), if it can resolve from your history what that link is, it pre-loads the page behind the scenes so that when you select the link, in all likelihood, most, if not all of the page has already been loaded. Firefox doesn't do that. I have no idea what IE does.
Yes indeedy, because I'm logging the HTTP Get stuff (I'm using .NET HttpListener) you can in fact see this behavior of Chrome's.
You also learn other things, more on the mundane level, but it gives one a real appreciation of what tags and attributes like "form", "submit", and "name" do and their interaction with regards to actually emitting a POST HTTP method. Or, another example, responding with the correct encoding of images vs text files.
It's quite fun stuff, and while I know that there's been a lot of work that others have put into the finer devilish details of writing a web server, it sure is nice to do something at the bare metal level which doesn't depend on IIS, doesn't use the bloated dog slow crap that I discovered is MVC Razor, or, in the *nix world, isn't a morass of arcane configuration files (Apache, nginx, etc) or involves yucky ducky languages/frameworks like Ruby on Rails.
Oh, and after several hours of hair pulling and teeth gnashing last night, I also learned that you do not (I was using an example, so I sadly copy&pasted the code) create buttons with and id of "submit" because this breaks, not just jQuery but the DOM itself, with something like $('#form').submit(); Go figure.
And of course the bug I found the most amusing is that (and it may have been fixed now, but according to SO it has been like this for like, you know man, forever) in Firefox, you can't programmatically submit a form unless the form actually has a button of type "submit". Wow.
What a f***ed up world the web is. And I was just reading on LinkedIn on some group post where someone said that XAML is more complicated and desktop UI is moving towards web-forms, which is much simpler.
Marc
|
|
|
|
|
That sounds like "seriously interesting article" material going on there! Are you going to write it up at some point?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
|
|
|
|
|
OriginalGriff wrote: That sounds like "seriously interesting article" material going on there! Are you going to write it up at some point?
Eventually -- there's a lot of bare bones examples out there on writing a web server, I think what I would want to demonstrate are the nuances of browser behavior and data interaction. Though, putting together a functional but bare bones web-server would probably be useful too -- Sacha's Simple REST Framework[^] though is a good place to start.
Marc
|
|
|
|
|
Agree-ing to Griff, and requesting for an article or the date of it! 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
|
|
|
|
|
Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan wrote: and requesting for an article or the date of it!
OK, OK, give me a few weeks. 
Marc
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
