Re: Flamewar _ DO NOT READ

Martin Bazley wrote:
I didn't miss any point, and I don't appreciate your insulting innuendos. If you for some reason *must* be rude to me, do it in private mail!

How?

I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Good Christ. Did you just say there's a BASIC interpreter in ROM? What is this thing then, a Commodore 64 with delusions of grandeur? :P

Very useful it is too. RISC OS is one of the last remaining OSes that
actually helps people to learn how to program without having to buy
expensive development kits.

Unfortunately, that's about all it does from the sounds of it.

Well ... we can sort of split that up into two claims. It is one of the last remaining OSes that comes with a programming language ... nope. Unixes still tend to come with a C development environment out of the box. Without having to buy expensive development kits ... nope. Linux comes with C/C++ development tools and can be downloaded for free. And free development kits are available for all sorts of other systems and languages. Sun's Java tools; free Windoze ports of gcc and its surrounding tool ecosystem; you name it.

I think the point you were trying to make, and it may be a valid one, is that it's one of the last that comes with a programming environment *that's designed for ease of learning by beginning programmers*. C and Java don't qualify there because of the steep learning curve for the language and (especially) the tools and compile/link/etc. tasks often done from a command line. There are IDEs, sure, but the bewildering variety of same makes things worse. Lack of an "immediate mode" where you can just do read/eval/print loops is another issue. BASICs, Logo, Smalltalks, and some of the Lisp derivatives provide that, and of those, Logo and some of the BASICs and Smalltalks are relatively easy to learn too.

MS-DOS used to come with a BASIC you could launch from the C:\> prompt and then use like many of the old ROM BASICs, only it was somewhat better for structured programming (and thus for learning same -- though it still had GOTO) and didn't (and wouldn't) double as a sort-of shell.

Why they stopped including a BASIC with Windows remains a mystery. A Linux distro that provides out-of-the-box a qbasic clone that runs under X would be interesting to see.

Randomly? Hardly. And I do know something. I know enough to know that this OS has severe problems stemming from being difficult to upgrade or patch. Problems one occurrence of which started this entire thread, in case you'd forgotten.

[some accusations of not reading stuff, and some mangled quoting]

Also until I rebuilt my Boot file the <Shift> key was non-operational

Here a file got b0rked. Happens also on Windows, but not on a real OS.

And you entirely skipped the scribbling-on-the-zero-page issue.

As Steamband has so far failed to cause grief to anyone else, we can
safely assume that it was an old keyboard that was the source of the
problem. It is physically impossible to continue to cause this kind of
behaviour via software when the machine is reset.

Unless that file gets b0rked again.

The reboot-as-quick-fix is also championed by Microsoft apologists. XP, in my experience, rarely gets b0rked to the point of needing a reinstall (even buggy driver installs can usually be fixed with a combination of a safe mode reboot and then either device manager/roll back driver or System Restore) but sometimes gets into wonky states that require reboots. More commonly, it's the shell, Explorer, that gets into a wonky state and needs restarting, but you lose all your open-folder-window session state if you restart Explorer in any other way than by rebooting. (A bug of omission; there really should have been a right click taskbar "restart Explorer" option that preserves session state by having Explorer do what it does on system shutdown, then exit, then restart and do what it does on system startup, without restarting anything else, such as the OS proper.)
.

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