Larkin, Power BASIC cannot be THAT good:

Larkin

too!

from 830 to 600 GB:

I do not think of myself as particularly loonie. Just the same, i have resized many file systems along the way. Always just after a backup and normally from outside (not on any mounted / running file system).

grow into the sky.

resize that partition to 67 %,

one would be then be faster,

partition,

Actually, what you have is an extreme case file set. I suggest that you look into using ext2 and giving it a radically different tuning using tunefs. The better speed of ext2 versus ext3 combined with the very low write frequency makes the journaling of ext3/4 unwarranted.

On a sunny day (Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:57:39 -0500) it happened krw wrote in :

;-)

Na, everybody knows that 'a bit' of something is highly variable ;-)

graphics

=20

Have you tried it? The PLRM is good to go to sleep by.

graphics

minimise

WRONG! They are both stack oriented languages but that is the limit of their similarity.

subprograms,

An "int" is guaranteed by the language to be at least 16 bits wide. (A "long" is guaranteed to be at least 32 bits wide).

If you want exact widths you can use the (C99) types

int16_t int32_t

Or the unsigned versions

uint16_t, uint32_t

Etc.

You poor bastard...

Bullshit. Pick any standard FORTH command - it works under PS.

It's not a problem if you're used to doing things the FORTH way. The trick is to build low level functions into words, test them thoroughly, then put them together to make your app. If you're used to languages like C, it's true that it's a difficult hurdle to jump.

Well, now you know why nobody writes apps in LISP. ;^)

John, have you tried FreeBASIC?

And if so, how does it compare to PowerBASIC?

True. BASIC is older than C.

Depends on the version.

Mostly true, although it depends on the version.

Not true.

Depends on the version.

Also not true. I've written recursive code in BASIC. Admittedly, it was painful.

Not true. You can write crap code in any language. If nothing else, BASIC's simple enough to be at least usable as pseudocode.

Unless you want to do graphics, or have a GUI.

subprograms,

Eight, or six, or twelve... ;^)

;-)

Until you connect a 74LSxx output to a 74HCxx input...

No, I haven't.

This is scary:

"When the compiler become stable enough - the actual priority - new optimizations will be added, like common sub-expressions elimination, dead code elimination, register variables, among others."

PB seems absolutely stable and very well optimized. So far, it has the record for doing my 64M-sample signal averaging thing, 207 millisec, better than any C that's been posted here.

The PB folks do actual support, too. Email them a question, and they answer. The documentation/HELP/manual are excellent too. I've noticed that free/open software tends to have abysmal, inarticulate documentation if it has any at all. If I save an hour somewhere, it's worth the price of the paid version.

John

The online help is actually fairly useful. The compiler seems stable enough for the constructs I've used, which isn't many, but it's not crashing left and right anyway.

For professional purposes you'd obviously use a professional piece of software, like PB.

Tim

Next you're going to tell me no one writes apps in SmallTalk either. :-)

I think this has been an interesting thread for a lot of people, illustrating the huge range of needs that various people have depending on what they're working on... everything from John's "one file per program, in PowerBasic" to Nobody's "thousands of files in multiple language all at once."

---Joel

It depends a lot on which package you pick -- Python and wxWidgets (the cross-platform GUI toolkit) both have very good documentation, whereas certainly many packages are pretty spartan when it comes to good documentation.

Writing documentation isn't the "fun" part of a project, right?