71–80 of 88 posts
The article states >By feeding legacy PRG (circa 1985) and logics to models like Claude, ChatGPT, developers can now instruct the AI to translate decades-old dBase PRG directly into memory-safe Rust, highly concurrent Go, or modern Dart/Flutter cross-platform applications. And it alludes to this early on, but it doesn't show any examples.
I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by their company, taught by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school. After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in comp…
It’s a pity your father’s perspective didn’t prevail. We’d all be using better programming languages now.
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I would prefer X is 5 X is x + 5
How do you feel about ADD 5 TO X GIVING X? I kid, of course, but "X is x + 5" brings Prolog to mind with all the unification and bidirectionality that implies.
Grammatically, this would not change X. "...GIVING X" would just return X. Since it's part of the same statement, it seems it should ignore the "ADD 5 TO X" part.
Now, if you'd like to place the result into X, I suggest "ADD 5 TO X" would suffice as the entire statement.
I remember dBASE IV from my childhood days when my father, who had no computer background, was required to take computer training by his workplace. My father and his colleagues were given free evening computer lessons by their company, taught by the same teachers who used to teach us, the kids, computers in our school. After their first class, he brought home a fat dBASE IV manual. Since I was very interested in comp…
10 X = X + 1
20 Y = Y - X
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It’s a pity your father’s perspective didn’t prevail. We’d all be using better programming languages now.
It's a notational issue. IIRC Pascal used := for assignment and = for equality testing. Where this becomes extremely Rorsarch is the spectrum between "notation is absolutely critical: there is only one correct representation of programs in people's heads and we have to match that exactly" vs. "all program text is ultimately syntactic sugar and programmers will just adapt to whatever". History tells us that the C choi…
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The = for assignment is FORTRAN’s fault. In the beginning there was no equality, just assignment, and FORTRAN (being just a FORmula TRANslator after all) made the somewhat dubious decision to use = for that (punch card space being sparse and symbols limited and all). When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instea…
A rumor I heard was that x := 4 was chosen because it looks similar to x ⇐ 4
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The = for assignment is FORTRAN’s fault. In the beginning there was no equality, just assignment, and FORTRAN (being just a FORmula TRANslator after all) made the somewhat dubious decision to use = for that (punch card space being sparse and symbols limited and all). When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instea…
> ALGOL decided to stick close to mathematical tradition And now we have all 3 in Python (=, ==, and :=) which makes me sad.
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I still maintain a VFP9 project from time to time. Although AI has been extremely helpful in writing VFP9 code, I can't imagine migrating this enormous project, which has grown over the course of 30 years, to a more modern system by feeding the source code to AI. While one could debate which approach would be best for migrating such a project, an 'AI-led Big Bang Migration' would be insane. However, AI would certainl…
If you're ever looking to migrate off of that a better starting point is finding a way to dump the DBF files into CSV (there's a perl script for this that works wonders called DBF2CSV but I hear LibreOffice can just open these files too)... After inheriting a project where the source code CDROM went missing I can definitely see a use case for at least trying with the latest frontier models to rescue the logic because…
> After inheriting a project where the source code CDROM went missing That sounds insane! Was it a VFP9 project?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The = for assignment is FORTRAN’s fault. In the beginning there was no equality, just assignment, and FORTRAN (being just a FORmula TRANslator after all) made the somewhat dubious decision to use = for that (punch card space being sparse and symbols limited and all). When FORTRAN gained equality it went for .EQ. out of practicality and necessity. Many others followed suit but used the somewhat more pleasant == instea…
A rumor I heard was that x := 4 was chosen because it looks similar to x ⇐ 4
The Xerox keyboards had the support for ⇐, with its workstation OSes being all graphical based.
When Smalltalk grew beyond Xerox PARC walls, ⇐ turned into :=
You can see this in the original Xerox PARC documents and books for Smalltalk.