[Coco] Broken Syntax (Was: Weird errors)

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 13 September 2006 04:02, Willard Goosey wrote:
>>Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:33:18 -0500
>>From: Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net>
>>
>>Another way to think about it is that hard coding the syntax of a
>>particular utility in a binary perhaps doesn't completely embody the
>>OS-9 toolbox philosophy.
>
>Perhaps, but there's also the OS-9 keep-it-small philosophy, the
>natural result of running a multitasking OS in 64K RAM with a 160K
>disk. ;-)
>
>Remember, for the most part we're talking about ten to twenty year old
>software.
>
>And part of the toolbox philosophy, to me, is "don't write it yourself
>if someone else has already done it for you."
>
>This used to be a core part of UNIX philosphy.  I admit UNIX grew away
>from this philosophy as it got big, but even now, lots of programs
>will fork off stty(1) instead of poking at the IOCTLs themselves.
>
>CS professors will tell you that code reuse is a good thing, rather
>the reused code is in a shared library or a collection of stand-alone
>utilities.
>
>For instance, I once wrote a utility under OS-9 to check rather /term
>was a windint window or a vdg screen.  It worked by forking "ident -m
>term" and reading ident's stdout.  Sure, it might have been a more
>educational excercise to link the term module into my memory space and
>rummage through it by hand, but I was working on a larger project and
>needed a small tool, quickly.
>
>>Perhaps it's a forgivable expediency and may improve performance
>>somewhat over reading the syntax from a configuration file.
>
>I have to admit, that's an interesting idea.
>
>>But my opinion would be that if you need to mess around with system
>>utilities, you probably should be wrapping the binary in a shell
>>script, which is easily editable.
>
>Shell scripts can be a little odd under OS-9.  They work fine when
>called from the shell, or from a program that calls the shell
>(system() or BASIC-09 SHELL) but fail utterly when called by F$Fork.
>GShell, for instance, doesn't know what to do with shell scripts.
>
>The older shells also had, I believe, very limited argument passing.
>
>Due to these limitations, BASIC-09 binaries get made where a UNIX
>shell script would have been sufficient.
>
>We don't have BASH, ya know. ;-)  I'm not complaining about Shell+
>here, it has become a very good little shell.
>
>>Hard coding such details in the BASIC-09 program module seems a
>>little ham-fisted to me.
>
>My understanding is that Microware warned that drivers and system
>calls might change, but that they would keep the utility syntax the
>same.
>
>And ham-fisted or not, it was/is the accepted programing style.  Look
>through old RAINBOWs or the BASIC-09 Tour Guide.  They're full of
>SHELL"this", SHELL"that", SHELL"Anything-you-cant-RUN" :-)
>
>>As I think about it more, why is BASIC-09 (is it the runb module we're
>>talking about here?) calling tmode in the first place,
>
>Actually, it's the mainline user module calling tmode.  runb neither
>knows or cares about the terminal status.
>
>One of the programs I've had this tmode problem with is stevie, a VI
>clone written in C and ported over to OS-9.  It's not just a BASIC09
>thing.
>
>>instead of just doing an appropriate setstat?
>
>Why waste precious memory on code that's only going to be run once,
>can be run outside your memory space (under LII), is harder to get
>right (information hiding and abstraction), and has already been done,
>anyway? (laziness:)
>
>>Why should it assume there is a tmode utility available at all?
>
>It's part of the standard distribution.
>
>>I wouldn't be too hard on Boisy here.  I think BASIC-09 is at fault.
>
>So, are you volunteering to port BASH to OS-9?  Or how about Python?
>(ASH may be a feasible port, but I think BASH's executable is more than
>64K...:)  I really would love to see more programming languages under
>OS-9.  APL, pilot, and forth are just too strange.

Bash is, at the moment:

[amanda at coyote src]$ ls -l /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 593304 Mar 11  2004 /bin/bash

So I think the 64k & :) grin is rather an understatement.

OTOH, because it is so capable a language all by itself, I'm doing things 
in a shell script that I would have used basic09 for on the coco, or ARexx 
for on the amiga.

>Willard
>--
>Willard Goosey  goosey at sdc.org
>Socorro, New Mexico, USA
>"I've never been to Contempt!  Isn't that somewhere in New Mexico?"
>   --- Yacko

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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