DOS ain't dead

classic/standard Pascal, modern Fortran, etc. (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 10.03.2019, 05:59

Just general language comments ....

> And not many people still care about ISO "standards" in Pascal, apparently.

Pascal-p5c fully supports ISO 7185 (as a translator in/for GCC/Clang-extended C). Not sure if anyone will ever use this to bootstrap another ("extended"?) Pascal compiler from scratch, but it's definitely cool.

> "Standard" code that runs nowhere else isn't very useful.
> (Oberon, while nice overall, is worse in that regard.)

I still never learned (ANS?) Forth, but they're always obsessed with bootstrapping. I think there was an Oberon parser in GNU Forth (Gray??). Not sure if I consider that too minimal (low-level) or not.

Oberon-07 is still Wirth's latest, and it's supported by Oxford Oberon 3.x series compiler (which sadly doesn't support DOS anymore; no, I haven't tried cross-compiling it, written in OCaml). But even that is only receiving minimal updates these days. (Should still mostly work under HX, but I haven't tried lately.)

> For the others, GNU Cauldron 2018 has some videos, including some stuff about C++ modules

No joke, it's easy to be snarky (Modula-2 had it forty years ago), but C++20 will have coroutines and modules. So that's great news (not that I grok C++).

In other interesting news, seems NVIDIA has been working on Fortran compilers (atop LLVM, mostly for x64?). Specifically, one called Flang (Fortran 2003, written in C) and a newer one, f18 (written in C++17), that partially supports the latest standard (formerly called Fortran 2015) and OpenMP. I don't grok Fortran either (though my brother got me a discarded library book about F77 a few years ago, which I never read), but it's still vaguely interesting. Though 2003 (major revision) was way complicated, and 2018 added better C interoperability since many low-level libraries are still written in that.

What a messy world. And that's ignoring all the other up-and-coming, trendy, modern languages (Rust, Go, Julia, Swift, Kotlin).

Yeah, it's just strange (almost) looking at 2003, thinking of the computing landscape then (WinXP, 32-bit P4 single core, Delphi 7), and comparing to 2018. Not just hardware and software (compilers, languages) but everything overall (video game consoles, cell phones, televisions, whatever). "Best of times, worst of times."

Complete thread:

• Digital Mars C/C++ Compiler relicensed to Boost License - roytam, 22.08.2018, 18:25 (Developers)
  • Digital Mars C/C++ Compiler relicensed to Boost License - Guti, 25.08.2018, 15:52
  • Digital Mars C/C++ Compiler relicensed to Boost License - roytam, 27.08.2018, 03:02
    • GCC: D and Modula-2 - Rugxulo, 03.11.2018, 03:13
      • classic/standard Pascal, modern Fortran, etc. - Rugxulo, 10.03.2019, 05:59
    • Digital Mars C/C++ Compiler relicensed to Boost License - tkchia, 22.08.2020, 18:37