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offete.com offline?

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  offete.com offline? hartpaulca@gmail.com - 2015-09-12 10:29 -0700
    Re: offete.com offline? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-09-12 14:08 -0400
    Re: offete.com offline? svforth@gmail.com - 2015-09-12 11:14 -0700
      Re: offete.com offline? hartpaulca@gmail.com - 2015-09-12 11:33 -0700
      Re: offete.com offline? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2015-09-12 11:44 -0700
        Re: offete.com offline? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-09-12 16:25 -0400
      Re: offete.com offline? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-09-12 16:25 -0400
        Re: offete.com offline? svforth@gmail.com - 2015-09-12 16:14 -0700
          Re: offete.com offline? chenhansunding@gmail.com - 2015-09-13 14:31 -0700
            Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-14 15:11 -0700
            Re: offete.com offline? dylan.mcnamee@gmail.com - 2015-09-15 14:01 -0700
              Re: offete.com offline? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-15 14:11 -0700
              Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-16 14:12 -0700
                Re: offete.com offline? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-09-17 01:06 -0700
                  Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-17 03:57 -0700
                    Re: offete.com offline? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-09-18 01:21 -0700
                      Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-18 11:39 -0700
                      Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-18 16:30 -0700
                        Re: offete.com offline? Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2015-09-21 01:08 -0700
                    Re: offete.com offline? "Rod Pemberton" <boo@fasdfrewar.cdm> - 2015-09-18 04:34 -0400
                  Re: offete.com offline? dylan.mcnamee@gmail.com - 2015-09-17 08:21 -0700
                    Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-17 14:33 -0700
                      Re: offete.com offline? dylan.mcnamee@gmail.com - 2015-09-17 14:37 -0700
                        Re: offete.com offline? hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2015-09-18 16:31 -0700
                    Re: offete.com offline? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-18 10:07 -0700
                      Re: offete.com offline? "Rod Pemberton" <boo@fasdfrewar.cdm> - 2015-09-18 13:55 -0400
                        Re: offete.com offline? Jason Damisch <jasondamisch@yahoo.com> - 2015-09-18 11:36 -0700
            Re: offete.com offline? MIchael Kalus <mik.kalus@gmail.com> - 2015-12-20 14:42 -0800
              Re: offete.com offline? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-12-20 23:24 -0500
                Re: offete.com offline? Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2015-12-20 22:04 -0800
                  Re: offete.com offline? MIchael Kalus <mik.kalus@gmail.com> - 2015-12-21 01:46 -0800
                    Re: offete.com offline? Albert van der Horst <albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> - 2015-12-21 14:19 +0000
              Re: offete.com offline? Albert van der Horst <albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> - 2015-12-21 14:12 +0000
    Re: offete.com offline? MIchael Kalus <mik.kalus@gmail.com> - 2015-11-08 13:04 -0800
      Re: offete.com offline? rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> - 2015-11-08 17:20 -0500
      Re: offete.com offline? David Schultz <abuse@127.0.0.1> - 2015-11-08 16:31 -0600
      Re: offete.com offline? visualforth@rocketmail.com - 2015-11-10 16:47 -0800
        Re: offete.com offline? JUERGEN <epldfpga@aol.com> - 2015-12-22 06:19 -0800
          Re: offete.com offline? MIchael Kalus <mik.kalus@gmail.com> - 2015-12-23 16:30 -0800
      Re: offete.com offline? MIchael Kalus <mik.kalus@gmail.com> - 2015-12-27 14:50 -0800
    Re: offete.com offline? dave.lindbergh@gmail.com - 2016-01-01 11:03 -0800
      Re: offete.com offline? Jan Coombs <jenfhaomndgfwutc@murmic.plus.com> - 2016-01-02 11:53 +0000
        Re: offete.com offline? Albert van der Horst <albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> - 2016-01-02 16:23 +0000

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#41969 — offete.com offline?

All,

Does anyone know what might have happened to Offete? Hopefully nothing bad...

I was trying to get some additional information on the various implementations of eForth, but it appears that something happened to offete.com in the last week - it's showing a squatter-esque page.

It looks like C.H. Ting still owns the domain, at least according to a search on Domain Tools, but the site is missing.

Many thanks,

Paul

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#41970

On 9/12/2015 1:29 PM, hartpaulca@gmail.com wrote:
> All,
>
> Does anyone know what might have happened to Offete? Hopefully nothing bad...
>
> I was trying to get some additional information on the various implementations of eForth, but it appears that something happened to offete.com in the last week - it's showing a squatter-esque page.
>
> It looks like C.H. Ting still owns the domain, at least according to a search on Domain Tools, but the site is missing.

Strange.  The server provide a page, but I can't see anything.  The link 
in the source brings up a squatter-esque page as you say.

The whois search shows, Updated Date: 2015-09-09.  That likely means it 
expired on the 9th and Ting may have to pay bigger bucks to get it back 
now.  If he waits another few weeks it may be lost to the domain name 
pirates.

This happened to a friend.  Because it showed as still being in her name 
I thought she had renewed it.  But not so and she ended up loosing it. 
Not so important in her case.

I also see, Expiration Date: 02-DEC-2015  which is the same day as the 
creation date and so would seem to be the proper expiration date.  So 
the update date may actually be some update which allowed his site to be 
hacked.  I'm not very sure at this point.

-- 

Rick

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#41971

     Ting is fine.  He just got tired of supporting Offete.  I'm exploring the possibility of hosting a static archive of the site but for now, it is just gone.
All Offete.com email addresses are also gone.
     If for some reason you are desperate to contact Ting, email me directly at at any time in the next 30 days.  If you are reading this in the year 2016 or later, look at forth.org for contact information.
     My email address is forther_at_comcast_dot_net
I do not read the svforth email address and I do not read news://comp.lang.forth so don't expect a response from either path.

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#41972

On Saturday, 12 September 2015 14:14:12 UTC-4, svf...@gmail.com  wrote:
> Ting is fine.  He just got tired of supporting Offete.  I'm exploring the possibility of hosting a static archive of the site but for now, it is just gone.
> All Offete.com email addresses are also gone.
>      If for some reason you are desperate to contact Ting, email me directly at at any time in the next 30 days.  If you are reading this in the year 2016 or later, look at forth.org for contact information.
>      My email address is forther_at_comcast_dot_net
> I do not read the svforth email address and I do not read news://comp.lang.forth so don't expect a response from either path.

(will also be emailing this...)

I'm pleased to hear that Ting is okay - I'll admit that my first reaction was to think that the site had expired because he had!

Actually, I was interested in purchasing a couple of the microprocessor versions of eForth - hopefully that material is still available somehow.

Thanks again for the swift follow-up!

Paul

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#41973

svforth@gmail.com writes:
>      Ting is fine.  He just got tired of supporting Offete.  I'm
> exploring the possibility of hosting a static archive of the site but
> for now, it is just gone.
> All Offete.com email addresses are also gone.

A static archive of the site would be nice.  There is a Wayback machine
crawl from September 8 on archive.org right now, but it would be
preferable to host it elsewhere.  If someone else gets the offete.com
domain and turns off crawling, the Wayback machine will automatically
take down the snapshots that it has.

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#41975

On 9/12/2015 2:44 PM, Paul Rubin wrote:
> svforth@gmail.com writes:
>>       Ting is fine.  He just got tired of supporting Offete.  I'm
>> exploring the possibility of hosting a static archive of the site but
>> for now, it is just gone.
>> All Offete.com email addresses are also gone.
>
> A static archive of the site would be nice.  There is a Wayback machine
> crawl from September 8 on archive.org right now, but it would be
> preferable to host it elsewhere.  If someone else gets the offete.com
> domain and turns off crawling, the Wayback machine will automatically
> take down the snapshots that it has.

If the domain hasn't expired, which it seems is correct for now, I would 
be happy to take it over and host the pages.  I guess I'll try to make 
that offer through the email address provided above.

-- 

Rick

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#41974

On 9/12/2015 2:14 PM, svforth@gmail.com wrote:
>       Ting is fine.  He just got tired of supporting Offete.  I'm exploring the possibility of hosting a static archive of the site but for now, it is just gone.
> All Offete.com email addresses are also gone.
>       If for some reason you are desperate to contact Ting, email me directly at at any time in the next 30 days.  If you are reading this in the year 2016 or later, look at forth.org for contact information.
>       My email address is forther_at_comcast_dot_net
> I do not read the svforth email address and I do not read news://comp.lang.forth so don't expect a response from either path.

Ok, so I guess it won't help me any to ask here just who you are???

-- 

Rick

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#41976

> 
> Ok, so I guess it won't help me any to ask here just who you are???
> 
> -- 
> 
> Rick

     I'm just Kevin Appert.  I'm a friend of Dr. Ting and he announced the closure of his website to me after he acted.
     
     

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#41987

On Saturday, September 12, 2015 at 4:14:27 PM UTC-7, svf...@gmail.com wrote:
> > 
> > Ok, so I guess it won't help me any to ask here just who you are???
> > 
> > -- 
> > 
> > Rick
> 
>      I'm just Kevin Appert.  I'm a friend of Dr. Ting and he announced the closure of his website to me after he acted.


Paul,

Thanks for the concerns.  I am still alive and, not very well.  I had some trouble with Yahoo Small Business when it failed to access my credit card account.  While trying to get the issue resolved, I thought it was a good time to close it down.  I will have to do it some time, and it might just as well be now.

I had not gotten much traffic on www.offete.com and thought it was not worthwhile to keep it up.  As for the materials distributed on it, I will talk to Kevin Appert to see how to dispose them.

Regards,

Ting.

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#42004

On Sunday, September 13, 2015 at 2:31:50 PM UTC-7, chenhan...@gmail.com wrote:
> I had not gotten much traffic on www.offete.com and thought it was not worthwhile to keep it up.  

When I was hired recently to write a cross-compiler, I wanted to use eForth. I couldn't get started with it though, due to a lack of documentation. I couldn't find any reference that listed all the words provided and explained what they did. I sent an email asking for such a reference, but got no response.

Because of this, I switched over to VFX from MPE. Within less than a week at VFX however, I ran into a major bug in VFX:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/olO-VHXJa1Q%5B26-50%5D
It took me over one week to fix the bug. Later on, after I had already fixed the bug, Stephen Pelc fixed the bug and released a new version with the bug fix. He also changed the user-agreement in his new version to state that people can't sell software that runs under the evaluation version of VFX, which is exactly what I was doing.

I would prefer to use eForth rather than VFX (mostly because of the revised user-agreement). The example programs in eForth looked impressive, so I think that eForth is a good Forth system. For a cross-compiler I don't really need the speed of VFX code, so I would be okay with eForth and its threaded implementation. I need a reference manual though. Maybe the needed documentation is in Chinese which is why I couldn't find it, or maybe it is in one of those books that cost money --- if so, I would buy the book, but I have to know which book actually has the reference manual before I spend any money. I asked my friend Ching-Tang Tseng for help, but the files that he sent me were the same as the ones I had already downloaded from your website.

If your health is bad, then I understand that you don't have time or energy for supporting eForth anymore. I wish you comfort and good health. :-) 

All of the Forth programmers are getting old now --- I'm not aware of any Forthers under the age of 40. I'm 49, and I remember in 1984 (when I graduated from high-school) that Forth was considered to be a more likely candidate than C for personal-computers; Forth was readily available for personal-computers, but C was entirely associated with Unix($$$). Now people get a degree in computer-science without ever hearing about Forth, and there is no next generation of Forth programmers. :-(

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#42018

On Sunday, September 13, 2015 at 2:31:50 PM UTC-7, chenhan...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, September 12, 2015 at 4:14:27 PM UTC-7, svf...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > 
> > > Ok, so I guess it won't help me any to ask here just who you are???
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > 
> > > Rick
> > 
> >      I'm just Kevin Appert.  I'm a friend of Dr. Ting and he announced the closure of his website to me after he acted.
> 
> 
> Paul,
> 
> Thanks for the concerns.  I am still alive and, not very well.  I had some trouble with Yahoo Small Business when it failed to access my credit card account.  While trying to get the issue resolved, I thought it was a good time to close it down.  I will have to do it some time, and it might just as well be now.
> 
> I had not gotten much traffic on www.offete.com and thought it was not worthwhile to keep it up.  As for the materials distributed on it, I will talk to Kevin Appert to see how to dispose them.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ting.

Dr. Ting,

I'm sorry to hear you're not well, but glad to hear that there may be a future for your Forth implementations and books. It would be a loss if those resources disappeared, and conversely, a wonderful contribution if they're made accessible to this community (and beyond). 

Very best to you,
dylan
--
(I'm new to comp.lang.forth, but was a "forther" as a youth in the 1980's, drifted away, but came back recently with a renewed interest in using 1970's and 80's technology in education).

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#42019

On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 2:01:12 PM UTC-7, dylan....@gmail.com wrote:

> I'm sorry to hear you're not well, but glad to hear that there may be a
> future for your Forth implementations and books. It would be a loss if those
> resources disappeared, 

I agree with Dylan.  If Mr. Ting decides to allow his work to be 
archived on the web someplace, It would need to be with the stipulation
that Mr. Ting is not to be disturbed if that is his wish.  He is, after
all, in retirement and not in the best of health.  

To any and all who ask to be allowed to host his archive may I suggest
that a disclaimer is also posted on the archive website asking that
he not be disturbed.  

Jason

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#42038

On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 2:01:12 PM UTC-7, dylan....@gmail.com wrote:
> (I'm new to comp.lang.forth, but was a "forther" as a youth in the 1980's, drifted away, but came back recently with a renewed interest in using 1970's and 80's technology in education).

Education for whom?

Why would anybody want to learn 1970's and 1980's technology?

Also, eForth has been upgraded periodically over the years by a variety of contributors, so it is not really 1980s technology --- unlike ANS-Forth that was written in stone by a non-programming salesperson who was recollecting what Charles Moore told her about Forth in the 1970s before he got kicked out of Forth Inc..

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#42053

On Wednesday, 16 September 2015 22:12:30 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 2:01:12 PM UTC-7, dylan....@gmail.com wrote:
> > (I'm new to comp.lang.forth, but was a "forther" as a youth in the 1980's, drifted away, but came back recently with a renewed interest in using 1970's and 80's technology in education).
> 
> Education for whom?
> 
> Why would anybody want to learn 1970's and 1980's technology?
> 
> Also, eForth has been upgraded periodically over the years by a variety of contributors, so it is not really 1980s technology --- unlike ANS-Forth that was written in stone by a non-programming salesperson who was recollecting what Charles Moore told her about Forth in the 1970s before he got kicked out of Forth Inc..

Actually there's a lot to be gained (for children in particular) with
80s computing technology. They're a lot more accessible than today's
machines, since they really have no OS to speak of. Turn on a C64 and
you're in BASIC ready to go in about 1 second. The BASIC language is
very gentle and easy to learn. This isn't really the case with the PCs.
It used to be that way in the DOS days. For example, Microsoft Quick
BASIC would be an excellent introduction. But those days are gone.

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#42055

On Thursday, September 17, 2015 at 1:06:50 AM UTC-7, Mark Wills wrote:
> On Wednesday, 16 September 2015 22:12:30 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:
> > On Tuesday, September 15, 2015 at 2:01:12 PM UTC-7, dylan....@gmail.com wrote:
> > > (I'm new to comp.lang.forth, but was a "forther" as a youth in the 1980's, drifted away, but came back recently with a renewed interest in using 1970's and 80's technology in education).
> > 
> > Education for whom?
> > 
> > Why would anybody want to learn 1970's and 1980's technology?
> > 
> > Also, eForth has been upgraded periodically over the years by a variety of contributors, so it is not really 1980s technology --- unlike ANS-Forth that was written in stone by a non-programming salesperson who was recollecting what Charles Moore told her about Forth in the 1970s before he got kicked out of Forth Inc..
> 
> Actually there's a lot to be gained (for children in particular) with
> 80s computing technology. They're a lot more accessible than today's
> machines, since they really have no OS to speak of. Turn on a C64 and
> you're in BASIC ready to go in about 1 second. The BASIC language is
> very gentle and easy to learn. This isn't really the case with the PCs.
> It used to be that way in the DOS days. For example, Microsoft Quick
> BASIC would be an excellent introduction. But those days are gone.

The C64 was pretty cool --- if people program it in 6502 assembly-language, then they are learning a lot --- they can learn the assembly-language quickly because it is simple, then get going on programming.

6502 assembly language has everything they need to get going on programming --- the only downside is that it is abysmally slow compared to modern processors --- still though, there were a lot of cool games written for the C64, and if it was fun then it should be fun now too.

OTOH, Qbasic lacked structs and lacked pointers --- people used hokey techniques to simulate structs, such as an array for each field in the struct --- they are learning bad habits that they have to unlearn later on.

Even today, this hokey technique is promoted by people who learned it in Qbasic or some similar crippled language and then it became a habit.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/gwrydxw9FIg

On Tuesday, September 8, 2015 at 10:54:54 AM UTC-7, Elizabeth D. Rather wrote:
> On 9/8/15 12:45 AM, Mux wrote:
> > So while we're on (de)structs... In ye olde days of 6502 programming, I used what I called 'vertical arrays' which is basically a struct, and to this day, I use as an alternative to structs.
> >
> > variable x 16 allot
> > variable y 16 allot
> > variable z 16 allot
> >
> > : get_x ( index -- x ) x + @ ;
> > : get_y ( index -- y ) y + @ ;
> > : get_z ( index -- z ) z + @ ;
> >
> > while technically not a struct in the C sense in that the, it's every bit as powerful without having to declare / create structures in forths that don't have them.
> 
> Your use of @ implies you meant this to be an array of cells, but you 
> ALLOTed in bytes :-)
> 
>   more Forthish way to do this is:
> 
> : ARRAY ( n -- )   CREATE CELLS ALLOT
>     DOES> ( i -- a )   SWAP CELLS + ;
> 
> ARRAY X   ARRAY Y   ARRAY Z
> 
> And if you wanted to build in bounds checking, etc., you can do it 
> centrally in ARRAY. Not at all C-ish.
> 
> Cheers,
> Elizabeth

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#42067

On Thursday, 17 September 2015 11:57:27 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:

> OTOH, Qbasic lacked structs and lacked pointers 

Your memory is faulty. Bit rot? :-)

QBASIC and Quick BASIC had TYPES

TYPE Invader
  Colour AS INT
  AnimationFrame AS INT
  ScoreDelta AS INT
  ScreenRow AS INT
  ScreenColumn AS INT
END TYPE

Dim Baddie AS Invader

Baddie.Colour = Colours.RED
Baddie.AnimationFrame = 0
Baddie.ScoreDelta = 100
Baddie.ScreenRow = 5
Baddie.ScreenColumn = 7

Or, you could do:

Dim Baddies(10) As Invaders

and get ten invaders.

QBASIC was pretty darned cool for its time. I was a big fan. I bought
the Quick BASIC version which included a compiler to compile your 
program into an EXE. Wrote a full-blown office administration system,
including UK Inland Revenue compliant payrole system for an employment
agency.

As far as teaching structs and arrays and types to kids goes, start with
the simple stuff, see who's not interested and who drops out, then, with
those that remain you incrementally ramp up the complexity. I think kids
today are not much different to when I was a kid. Some will be totally
un-interested, and others will be hooked - hook, line, and sinker. Those
are the ones that the majority of the effort should be spent on.

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#42076

On Friday, September 18, 2015 at 1:21:41 AM UTC-7, Mark Wills wrote:
> On Thursday, 17 September 2015 11:57:27 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:
> 
> > OTOH, Qbasic lacked structs and lacked pointers 
> 
> Your memory is faulty. Bit rot? :-)
> 
> QBASIC and Quick BASIC had TYPES

My memory likely is faulty, as it has been 25 years. I remember that the line-number BASICs lacked structs and pointers, but apparently Qbasic was much more advanced.

I remember seeing a Qbasic program that used multiple arrays, one for each field in the struct --- it is possible that it had been ported line-by-line from GW-BASIC and hence hadn't taken advantage of Qbasic's structs.

I remember playing the GORILLA.BAS program and also modifying it. :-)

I was more into Quick Pascal in those days, and didn't pay much attention to Quick Basic --- they may have been not much different though.

> As far as teaching structs and arrays and types to kids goes, start with
> the simple stuff, see who's not interested and who drops out, then, with
> those that remain you incrementally ramp up the complexity. I think kids
> today are not much different to when I was a kid. Some will be totally
> un-interested, and others will be hooked - hook, line, and sinker. Those
> are the ones that the majority of the effort should be spent on.

Certainly it is best to start with the easy stuff and work up to the harder stuff. Also, I was never a believer in Dubya's "No Child Left Behind" idea --- a lot of those obnoxious brats deserve to be left behind --- I can imagine Dubya himself as the boy in the back of the classroom eating Elmer's Glue and carving his initials in his desk with a pocket-knife, and I can imagine how much better the world would have been if he had been left behind.

I'm just saying that we don't want to outlaw the advanced features in an effort to make the language simplistic for the dubya crowd. Pompous talk about the "Forthish way" really offends me:

On Tuesday, September 8, 2015 at 10:54:54 AM UTC-7, Elizabeth D. Rather wrote: 
> On 9/8/15 12:45 AM, Mux wrote: 
> > So while we're on (de)structs... In ye olde days of 6502 programming, I used what I called 'vertical arrays' which is basically a struct, and to this day, I use as an alternative to structs. 
> > 
> > variable x 16 allot 
> > variable y 16 allot 
> > variable z 16 allot 
> > 
> > : get_x ( index -- x ) x + @ ; 
> > : get_y ( index -- y ) y + @ ; 
> > : get_z ( index -- z ) z + @ ; 
> > 
> > while technically not a struct in the C sense in that the, it's every bit as powerful without having to declare / create structures in forths that don't have them. 
> 
> Your use of @ implies you meant this to be an array of cells, but you 
> ALLOTed in bytes :-) 
> 
>   more Forthish way to do this is: 
> 
> : ARRAY ( n -- )   CREATE CELLS ALLOT 
>     DOES> ( i -- a )   SWAP CELLS + ; 
> 
> ARRAY X   ARRAY Y   ARRAY Z 
> 
> And if you wanted to build in bounds checking, etc., you can do it 
> centrally in ARRAY. Not at all C-ish. 
> 
> Cheers, 
> Elizabeth 

If this is our Standard way to program Forth, then we are better off to not have a Standard at all --- I don't care if the Forth Inc. employees want to program in this way at Forth Inc. --- but they have no right to impose their incompetence on the rest of the Forth community.

Also, what is the big barrier in using Forths that "don't have" structs? It is trivial write a FIELD definer, as Forth is an extensible language --- I did this in the novice-package --- many people have done this (although usually not as efficiently as I did).

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#42081

On Friday, September 18, 2015 at 1:21:41 AM UTC-7, Mark Wills wrote:
> On Thursday, 17 September 2015 11:57:27 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:
> 
> > OTOH, Qbasic lacked structs and lacked pointers 
> 
> Your memory is faulty. Bit rot? :-)
> 
> QBASIC and Quick BASIC had TYPES
> 
> TYPE Invader
>   Colour AS INT
>   AnimationFrame AS INT
>   ScoreDelta AS INT
>   ScreenRow AS INT
>   ScreenColumn AS INT
> END TYPE
> 
> Dim Baddie AS Invader
> 
> Baddie.Colour = Colours.RED
> Baddie.AnimationFrame = 0
> Baddie.ScoreDelta = 100
> Baddie.ScreenRow = 5
> Baddie.ScreenColumn = 7
> 
> Or, you could do:
> 
> Dim Baddies(10) As Invaders
> 
> and get ten invaders.

It has been quite a while, but thinking back on it I recall now what the situation was. Qbasic didn't have pointers, and it didn't have a heap. So you had to use an array of structs such as your Baddies above. If you wanted your nodes linked together (such as in a binary-tree or linked-list) you made the link be an index into the array. The problem was that you had to guess ahead of time how big the array should be. If there was only one array then you made it as big as possible. If there were more then one however, then you had to guess for each, and this was where trouble began. You might have a program work fine several times in a row, but then one time it crashes because one of the arrays overflowed --- and, with typically abysmal programmer-luck, that would be the time when you are demonstrating the program to the customer.

Also, you had to do your own ALLOCATE and FREE. This was time-consuming because it was written in BASIC rather than being built-in to the language in which case it would have been written in C (Qbasic was written in C). 

Anyway, this is my recollection as to why I chose Quick Pascal over Quick Basic --- I still might be misremembering though, as it has been 25 years --- I was actually employed as a C programmer at the time, so Quick Pascal was just for my personal use.

It is a moot point now, as all of that MS-DOS stuff is obsolete by about two decades --- none of this explains why anybody would want to use arrays in Forth now --- although I provide arrays in the novice-package, I have never actually used them in any program (I did have an array in the LowDraw.4th program, but that was written prior to the novice-package being written).

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#42098

On Saturday, 19 September 2015 00:30:13 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:
> On Friday, September 18, 2015 at 1:21:41 AM UTC-7, Mark Wills wrote:
> > On Thursday, 17 September 2015 11:57:27 UTC+1, hughag...@gmail.com  wrote:
> > 
> > > OTOH, Qbasic lacked structs and lacked pointers 
> > 
> > Your memory is faulty. Bit rot? :-)
> > 
> > QBASIC and Quick BASIC had TYPES
> > 
> > TYPE Invader
> >   Colour AS INT
> >   AnimationFrame AS INT
> >   ScoreDelta AS INT
> >   ScreenRow AS INT
> >   ScreenColumn AS INT
> > END TYPE
> > 
> > Dim Baddie AS Invader
> > 
> > Baddie.Colour = Colours.RED
> > Baddie.AnimationFrame = 0
> > Baddie.ScoreDelta = 100
> > Baddie.ScreenRow = 5
> > Baddie.ScreenColumn = 7
> > 
> > Or, you could do:
> > 
> > Dim Baddies(10) As Invaders
> > 
> > and get ten invaders.
> 
> It has been quite a while, but thinking back on it I recall now what the situation was. Qbasic didn't have pointers, and it didn't have a heap. So you had to use an array of structs such as your Baddies above. If you wanted your nodes linked together (such as in a binary-tree or linked-list) you made the link be an index into the array. The problem was that you had to guess ahead of time how big the array should be. If there was only one array then you made it as big as possible. If there were more then one however, then you had to guess for each, and this was where trouble began. You might have a program work fine several times in a row, but then one time it crashes because one of the arrays overflowed --- and, with typically abysmal programmer-luck, that would be the time when you are demonstrating the program to the customer.
> 
> Also, you had to do your own ALLOCATE and FREE. This was time-consuming because it was written in BASIC rather than being built-in to the language in which case it would have been written in C (Qbasic was written in C). 
> 
> Anyway, this is my recollection as to why I chose Quick Pascal over Quick Basic --- I still might be misremembering though, as it has been 25 years --- I was actually employed as a C programmer at the time, so Quick Pascal was just for my personal use.
> 
> It is a moot point now, as all of that MS-DOS stuff is obsolete by about two decades --- none of this explains why anybody would want to use arrays in Forth now --- although I provide arrays in the novice-package, I have never actually used them in any program (I did have an array in the LowDraw.4th program, but that was written prior to the novice-package being written).

Yep, it's moot - ancient history. But for record, you *could* allocate
and de-allocate:

Dim Baddies(10) ' declare array of 10 baddies

...
...
(later on)
Redim Preserve Baddies(100) ' need 100 baddies on this level

(later on)
Redim Preserve Baddies(20) ' only need 20 on this level


And so on... The Preserve keyword kept what was in the array from 0
to n-1, so

Redim Preserve Baddies(5)

would keep 0 to 4.

You also had Option Base so your elements could start from 0 or 1
or, if you wanted, you could start your elements from anything:

Dim Baddies(7 to 14) AS Invader

Though why you would want to do that is beyond me!

Ah - old memories coming back. A lot of that stuff made it into Visual
Basic, all the way up to the last version (Version 6) - which is probably
how I can still remember it.

I remember the DOS gui for Quick Basic (and quick C) was very good
indeed and supported a mouse (if you could perform the various 
AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS machinations to load a mouse driver).

Oh... CONFIG.SYS... bad memories...

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#42069

On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 06:57:24 -0400, <hughaguilar96@gmail.com> wrote:

> OTOH, Qbasic lacked structs and lacked pointers

As Mark pointed out, you probably meant M$' C64 BASIC.

> --- people used hokey techniques to simulate structs,
> such as an array for each field in the struct ---
> they are learning bad habits that they have to unlearn
> later on.
>

LOL!

You have absolutely no idea how C implements types,
do you?  All C objects must map onto an array of bytes.
It's mandatory per the C specifications.

If Forth doesn't have the ability to do this built-in,
why is it bad practice when they implement it?  Isn't
this just another hidden anti-C rant?


Rod Pemberton


-- 
Just how many texting and calendar apps does humanity need?

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