XP is garbage

Not quite. NT/2000 uses code taken from the early versions of OS/2 back when billy and IBM parted ways. Until it was bastardized into XP, OS/2 text mode apps ran quite well in it. Why, it even creates OS/2 directories during the install, which I am sure galled mr bill no end. The man never created anything. He's just one of the best resellers on the market

JB

The only thing in NT that is remotely OS/2 is NTFS, which is nearly HPFS, both written by M$ (Balmer, IIRC). NT has more VMS parentage (D. Cuttler) than OS/2.

Sorry, I won't go to war with anyone over OS/2 anymore. BTDT. If you research it, you will find that I am right. I was there when it was going on. If you don't want to research it, that's okay :-) Life is too short to bother fussing over something that old.

JB

'Tis Ok, if you're wrong. M$ bailed on OS/2 V3 and went their own way on NT. IBM pulled back too and did their own V3. Notice that NT doesn't have anything like the WPS. It can't.

No language, and I have used quite a few over the last 50 years, is self documenting except in certain very rare circumstances. Your statement re commenting is wrong. For many years APLs have allowed comments on the same line as code. Only the very early ones required comments to be alone on a line. Also, documentation and comments took up space and in the early days with 32KB workspaces that could present a problem. Sometimes those separate workspaces got lost. On the other hand ANY language can be missused to produce undocumented, uncommented and unreadable code.

My practice, these days, is to produce one or more (usually more) lines of comments at the beginning of a function briefly explaining its purpose, what is expect as argument(s) and what is the nature of the result. In the body of the function, I add a comment to the line stating _what_ I'm doing, not _how_ I'm doing it. Read the code for that.

A very simple example avoiding the character set problem: {del} z{is}D_S_T yr;M;DTS;D;dt;{quad}IO

No more so that C or several others.

Ted

But I am not wrong.

Notice that NT and Win2K run OS/2 text apps natively. Bill would never allow that if he had a choice. I am sure he always loved having NT/2K install OS/2 files and system info on his might server software. Its not there because he was doing IBM a favor or anything.

Part of the split was for billy to abscond with the base code that his group had begun to develop jointly with IBM, and go from there. That is why microsoft owns the rights to HPFS, IBM just owns the license to sell it, so M$ had to make do with the sadly inferior NTFS instead.

And no one who ever worked for microsoft was EVER intelligent enough to create something like the WPS.....

John

The projector didn't come until the '80s. Large wall mounted monitors were available (and I used 'em) in the mid '70s. If you don't believe the laptop, check out the Copenhagen daily, "Politiken" for 1973 Aug 29.

Personally, I don't think there's such a thing if you consider in the cost in time/money to create the application. Your comments on matrices suggest you aern't really into anything mathematical. I'd really hate to have to write some of my stuff in PL-1. Life is too short.

At the time I had, and was familiar with, 8086 assembler, BASIC, Pascal, C and APL compilers and or interpreters. I have worked with others but these were the ones I was using on a daily basis. I used the tool that would produce a quality piece of software in a timely fashion. BTW, I still have that software and have developed it further. I now use it for documenting my various projects. Much quicker, better graphics, less physical storage space and easier to find again than paper.

Not really. The students handed in their assignments on floppies. Source code, data and output from a run all there. Easy for me to read, test and add comments when appropriate.

Ted

Comments were always allowed, just awkward, given the way APL is written. It really does suggest one-line functions (programs). It is powerfule, no doubt, but that's also it's downfall. Again, I used APL for a decade and found it very useful, but *not* a GP language.

Sure, APL suggests this though. Block-structured languages are quite different in this way. I hear even BASIC can be documented. ;-)

That might work for you, but what about the next poor slob?

You are indeed unique! I'd rather deal with PL/I (actually I'm a hardware type, so I do VHDL these days).

Ok, you're the king of APL. I bow to you. We're not talking about doufs here. APL was simplay an inappropriate language to build a business around. You diagree. Fine, bbut business is a littl e more complicated than "getting it done".

Ok. You the boss. . DO you want to *OWN* that code for the rest of your life? No one else does either. APL sucks for static problems (like databases). It's great for engineering problems, but they're hardly static.

assembler?

Nonsense. C sucks as a GP language. Add on the ++ and it's horrid.

Bullshit! YOu didn't read *anything* I wrote. It's a *great* language, if you think the world is a matrix. It's unsupportable by people who don't think that way. You're an engineer and think of life as a matix.

BTW, most scientific work is still done in FORTRAN. Why? Because of its imaginary numeric packages. I do believe there's some matrix manipulations in there too.

Your fav nail was (ans is still) APL. You have much invested in it so you find a way to continue.

Perhaps you had a better class of students than I. Grading programs was a PITA. Few worked, most crashed the system. Fortunately that was in the days of floppys, so I didn't have to worry abut infecting my system.

I really find it hard to believe that most *newly* developed code for scientific work is done in FORTRAN. C++ has complex number support built-in as well, and it's very clean to provide matrix support by overloading operators.

What was your grading policy? Seems to me that -- assuming you provided some test input files -- a program that crashed the system was if anything worse than not even turning in the assignment and would receive an immediate "F" :-)

I took a few CS classes back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late '80s, and one of the things I'm (now) very glad they did to us was to give us input files that were well defined but full of as much gratuitous "junk" (extra spaces, tabs, blank lines, extra characters at the end of the lines, etc.) as the file definition would allow -- it forced everyone to write reasonably bullet-proof parsers.

---Joel Kolstad

Comments were always allowed, true, but in early APL's (e.g. the first APL\360) comments were only full lines. Later comments could full lines or at the end of any line. I can't see why adding a comment to a line is any more difficult than in other languages. In fact, i have to type four characters to put in a comment in C whereas only one is needed in APL.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusiont that you have a lot of personal biases that you are stating as facts.

What sort of application have you written in PL-I that couldn't be done in current APL2?

If he/she can't read the code to see the details, what is he/she doing trying to modify it? C, PL-I, Pascal are so verbose that you say what you are doing more compactly than the code expresses it. Of course, after a few cycles of "enhancing", "modifying" or "correcting", the comments have little to do with what the code does.

The big advantage of PL-I in business is that you need ten of your "doufs" (sic) to do what one competent APL programmer could do. It is well known that managers pay is dependent on how many people are under him/her. Thus no IT manager wants APL - it would make hi/her redundant or at least "worth" less money.

OK. Enjoy your rut. I'm done.

Ted

All I'm going to read. This is a waste of time. You are stuck in the PL-I rut and think everything and everybody else is a waste of space-time.

Actually the world is a high order tensor. Latest theories suggest perhaps as high as 10.

You mean like you?

Interesting. You are wrong again.

APL2 has complex numbers at the primitive level. Has had for years. Before that my complex arithmetic package, originally written for APL\360 in 1967, was quite widely distributed. I wrote it because a collegue and I were working on different applications involving microwave propagation in lossy dielectrics.

Certainly would be if you didn't have anything better than PL-I plus a couple years to write your software.

I guess you had crappy systems.

Ted

It's too bad that more web page authors didn't take that course!

Ted