21–30 of 60 posts
In page 44 onwards, this describes how to do class-based OOP with assembly language extensions to generate vtable calls. I wonder who ever used that…
This post brings me many memories from Turbo Vision, Borland Graphics Interface, a simple assembly language, the flat memory hack, Turbo Pascal with its super fast compile time...
Borland manuals were a pure delight.. as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system. I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine r…
You'd think that many devs would want something like this, to code via SSH while logged on a remote dev system, or perhaps from a mobile device app. Is it really that hard?
Borland manuals were a pure delight.. as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system. I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine r…
I don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
>Most people think of assembly language as a low-level language. Turbo Assembler, however, provides many of the features of a high-level language (such as abstract data types, and easy interfacing to other languages). The addition of object-oriented data structures gives Turbo Assembler the power to create object-oriented programs as easily as high-level languages while retaining- the speed and flexibility of assembl…
Borland manuals were a pure delight.. as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system. I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine r…
I don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
The Unix terminal is derived from line printers (teletype), a fundamentally different kind of TUI.
I don’t know how much this realistically affects today’s terminals since we have extremely fast connections. But it’s the original reason why those DOS text UIs had such a distinct snappy feel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
The IBM PC text mode buffer was mapped into memory, so you could quickly update any part of the screen and easily do things like double-buffering (for rock-solid screen updates), composing the screen out of floating windows held in separate memory buffers, etc. The Unix terminal is derived from line printers (teletype), a fundamentally different kind of TUI. I don’t know how much this realistically affects today’s te…
My favourite Assembler, in those days I would imagine Assembly would be the way to keep coding going forward, how wrong I was.
A friend of mine used to be a big proponent of this. His theory being that sure, you need someone special to be very productive in assembly. But there's a billion of Chinese where the market is just opening up… (So I guess it was a few assembly geniuses for your OS and productivity software and the rest of us mortals filling in with the less performant rest written in C++ or E or Blitz Basic something)
https://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/HighLevelAsm/...
and thought it would be awesome to use that for work. Imagine the power of assembly combined with readability/productivity like Pascal.
Well, I never use assembly professionally, and HLA itself isn't maintained anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine used to be a big proponent of this. His theory being that sure, you need someone special to be very productive in assembly. But there's a billion of Chinese where the market is just opening up… (So I guess it was a few assembly geniuses for your OS and productivity software and the rest of us mortals filling in with the less performant rest written in C++ or E or Blitz Basic something)
I discovered Randall Hyde's HLA (High Level Assembly) while in the university around 2005/2006: https://www.plantation-productions.com/Webster/HighLevelAsm/... and thought it would be awesome to use that for work. Imagine the power of assembly combined with readability/productivity like Pascal. Well, I never use assembly professionally, and HLA itself isn't maintained anymore.
But yeah, other than some weekend hacks not worth the trouble.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IBM PC text mode buffer was mapped into memory, so you could quickly update any part of the screen and easily do things like double-buffering (for rock-solid screen updates), composing the screen out of floating windows held in separate memory buffers, etc. The Unix terminal is derived from line printers (teletype), a fundamentally different kind of TUI. I don’t know how much this realistically affects today’s te…
There are some *nix programs with complex TUI's, where a "snappy feel" is sought after (e.g. the `aptitude` TUI for package management in Debian and its derivatives) and they're just as snappy as any old DOS app. The overhead from using a terminal-based API is just too low to matter.
But design decisions made in the 1980s still linger in a lot of Unix software.