| The more sophisticated Windows users think PowerShell is wonderful | because it give them access to a lot of stuff the GUI doesn't touch, | including a lot of things that *should* be in management GUIs e.g. | finding mailbox sizes in the last version of Exchange that I had | dealings with. That shouldn't be a command-line-only job, given what | else the GUI does cover. | | But it's *Windows* stuff. *nix has always had a shell (indeed many) to | reach the command-line APIs of various daemons and applications.
I thought they ported it to Linux. At any rate, that's why they produced it in the first place. It's superfluous, poorly designed crap that's not dependably on all systems and has become a venue for attacks. The only reason they came out with it was to provide something for Linux sever admins that would look familiar. As far as I'm concerned, Linux can have it. Windows script with COM is far more extensive and adaptable.
Friday March 26 2021 13:43, you wrote to Adrian Caspersz:
I had a Touch system that was used to migrate MS, DR and others to their drive formats and more importantly to test said products on it.
We did this for a very large number of PC manufacturers even before IBM got in on the act.
Around the same time we developed a multi drive formatting machine which was a bit of a large beast that supported CPM, MPM, DOS (PC and others), GEM & *nix for drives of 8", 5.25 and 3.5" and the odd odd one such as a 2.5".
When we got orders for specific software we would copy from a master to the specific format using programs written in C and Basic.
As we were the European distributor for many software vendors covering the Operating Systems and applications the hardware manufacturers came to us for their requirements for delivery any where outside the US.
The Company was M.P.I (Microcomputer Products International) and we shut down mid to late 1985 due to others doing similar but with silly and heavy discounting even to end users. Needless to say that within 3 months of us closing most of the others did the same so may be we closed a bit too early :(
At least it allowed to get some flying in over the next few years by going from a PPL to IMC, Night, IR, Instructor, Twin, Jet and Commercial licenses and ratings.
Must have done over 2,000 hours over a period of those 48 months covering trips all over Europe and Middle East as well as some trips bringing over a few twins mostly direct from the US to the UK and where ever possible using the jet streams for max speed (ground) so on some A/C it was well under 12 hours with the odd one or two under 9. Not bad for piston based a/c. Not can't counting the turbines.
For me PowerShell doesn't absolutely need any such sophistication (/bloat) like on Windows, but I find it useful as a language on the command line.
Some people like PHP on the command line, but that's them ..
For scripting use, PowerShell's language features (variables, conditionals, pipelines, iterations, parameters, heredocs, etc....) have been stolen from Bash and considerably improved upon.
I float between Bash and PowerShell, though only done a couple of PowerShell projects on Linux (network card throughput testing was one), I much prefer the syntax and tools available (VSCODE)
My other pain point lately is the Puppet language and Icinga. ugh...
I think it's an cool admirable thing. I started there.
There are a few non-linux (or linux very hidden) single board computer projects out there, that power up from cold straight into a BASIC interpreter command line, just like the old home microcomputers.
The 8-bit guy showed this one on YouTube, and there are others.
Color Maximite 2 - ARM CPU that runs BASIC!
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The Raspberry Pi 400, to me is just screaming to be booted up with a BBC BASIC prompt without a GUI. Just switch it on, and start coding like it's 1984... er, 1981.
I occasionally
I used to be an Access developer for many many years, an occupation that nearly sent me to the nut house ...
I still do a lot of windows things for work, with MS Office but I don't use VBA or any of the development tools inside Excel or Access.
Instead, I drive the relevant Office COM libraries from PowerShell, to create spreadsheets with pivot tables from scratch. It is an order of magnitude faster and avoids living with the underlying often corrupted file formats of xls and mdb.
It's not a popular programming technique though, and there are folks that use Access VBA to be quick and dirty. I hate that.
If you had a BBC Micro in 1981 I'm impressed, there were a handful of model As shipped in December but even at Torch we didn't get model B boards until well into 1982.
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Yes, though something I've see recently (a 20,000 line script written using the Bourne Shell) has left me reeling and gagging and wishing I'd never see it.
That said, bash is fine for the relatively short scripts I write with it, but the way that it tends to stop on finding the first error makes it unsuitable for anything longer than a few tens of lines, in my opinion, anyway, because the stop-on-error approach makes debugging a large script very slow unless you writeand test incrementally, which is still slow going.
The two best scripting languages I've used are the mainframe scripting language implemented for VME/B the ICL 2900 operating system, and IBM's OS/400 scripting language, which both have very similar abilities, in particular:
- very consistent syntax and utility naming conventions: on both OSen you can reliably guess the name of a utility you've not previously used though OS/400 muddies this because all names are max 9 characters and it doesn't use name extensions such as .txt or .html
- VME/B used two names for everything: a long name and and an abbreviation and the abbreviation formats were equally consistent, so the deletefile(myfile) command deleted 'myfile' and so did xf(myfile). You tended to use long names when writing SCL procedures (i.e. shell scripts) and short names when typing commands into a terminal.
- OS/400 was just carefilr with its horrid short names, but at least if you knew that if crtcblpgm was the COBOL compiler, crtrpgpgm was the RPG3 compiler, crtplipgm compoiled PL/1 and crtftnpgm compiled Fortran.
- both compiled their script equivalents (procedures) very fast and had good error reporting while compiling them.
- both used typed parameters allowed each parameter to be given a type, name, default value and a short description.
- both had the equivalent of -? or --help but it worked by flashing up a full-screen display of the procedure name and parameters, showing type, name default value and description so you just entered your parameters and hit the 'do it' key.
- both had a well-thought-out equivalent to the Unix/Linux 'apropos' tool for finding commands by name.
Something like that would be a huge improvement for Linux, especially if it was somehow possible to agree a more rational set of command names, but I cant see the latter happening before the heat death of the universe.
Put RISC OS on it, and do a *ROMModules and note the number next to BASIC then do a *Configure Language Next time you boot you'll be at the BASIC Prompt just like a BBC Micro.
To restore booting to the desktop, use the number for the Desktop module.
Given the paucity of useful answers, here are the ones I use:
Michael Haardt's Bas ?
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: comman d-line interpreter for a pretty complete implementation of ANSI Full BASIC (the one with matrix commands, but this one doesn't allow decimal floating point like the standard expects). There's a slightly updated version availa ble if you substitute 2.6 for 2.5 in the download link.
Matrix Brandy BASIC VI ?
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: a v ery much improved BBC BASIC VI interpreter, which is able to compete with t he RISC OS one for speed. The main brandy executable is graphical, but you can build the tbrandy and sbrandy command-line interpreters that work well from the shell.
Richard Russell's BBC BASIC for SDL has command-line interpreters ? ?
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: Richard has maintained m any versions of BBC BASIC, from BBC BASIC for the Z80 Second Processor to B BC BASIC for Windows. He was also on the language steering committee.
cbmbasic - Commodore BASIC V2 as a scripting language ?
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: this is Commodore 64 basic transpiled into C, s o you're effectively running 6502 instructions very quickly on your machine . Objectively, it's a fairly terrible BASIC interpreter, but you can call s cripts with the #! line, if you must.
There are some other niche BASIC interpreters/compilers:
freebasic: a compiler that is vaguely inspired by QuickBASIC/Visual BASIC
PC-BASIC: a very faithful clone of GW-BASIC written in Python
x11-basic: an interpreter/compiler very much influenced by GFA-BASIC on t he Atari ST and Amiga. The developer's been working on this for about 20 ye ars pretty much for their own amusement
Decimal BASIC: this one can be a little hard to compile, and it doesn't h elp that most of the docs are in Japanese, but this is a complete (graphica l-only) implementation of ANSI Full BASIC with decimal mathematics. Experie nce the joy of numbers rounding properly!
Of course, you could always run QBasic in DOSbox for all your GORILLAS.BAS needs.
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