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seven programming languages on one floppy (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 25.03.2023, 04:12

> > As pointless as some people consider it, I've long wondered what (in
> > theory) to put on a 1.44 MB 3.5" programming floppy for FreeDOS.
> >
> > However, my criteria are that it must be Free/Libre (i.e.
> redistributable)
> > and must actually be used by someone!
>
> I am interested in this proposal, but can you elaborate on what the
> situation might be?
It's purely hypothetical, but I want to try to be practical.

> Because you've specified "must actually be used".
Things like PL/0 are certified toys that nobody uses. I want something useful (e.g. AWK, but even Sed is also good albeit not Turing complete).

> Can you give me a theoretical use case where someone would be using a 1.44
> MB floppy?
10 MB hard disk image? 20? 50? 2 GB? When is it enough to do "something" useful?

> Would this be on a real computer after a nuclear holocaust and civilization
> is being rebuilt? Or perhaps if you lock someone in a basement with that
> real or emulated hardware and told them that was the only thing available -
> it was either that or watch ants?
I was thinking more like: "Let's tell news://comp.lang.misc or news://comp.lang.asm.x86 and see what they come up with (in a year)." You know, give them a limited environment to develop something useful (that doesn't require ten bazillion gigs).

> > MAWK, miniSed, P5 Pascal, Alice Pascal, SmallerC, SubC, PicoC, DX Forth,
> > NASM16 or TinyAsm, FASMD, a72, BWBASIC, SmallAda, ???
>
> Enhancing SubC using SubC would be a worthy project that may come close to
> fitting on a floppy.
 >
> Anyway, that's why I ship both an older SubC that is self-compiling and an
> enhanced SubC built with Watcom large memory model on the PDOS/86
> distribution. Theoretically it might just be enough so that you don't have
> to zap machine code, and can instead do all your programming in a subset of
> C (and that subset can be lifted if you spend effort).
It's not that assembly is impossible or that C is so perfect, but a little structure and portability go a long way.

Maybe I just want to reinvent Minix (aka "mini-UNIX"). Or even FreeBSD with Ports. Or Gentoo for DOS.

I'm also thinking of bootstrapping like what is done with Guix.

> GNU Mes is a Scheme interpreter and C compiler for bootstrapping
> the GNU System. Since version 0.22 it has again helped to halve
> the size of opaque, uninspectable binary seeds that are currently
> being used in the Further Reduced Binary Seed bootstrap of GNU Guix.
> The final goal is to help create a full-source bootstrap as part of
> the bootstrappable builds effort for UNIX-like operating systems.

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