DOS ain't dead - in/out Ports in HLLs (e.g. Turbo Pascal, BRexx, QBASIC)

in/out Ports in HLLs (e.g. Turbo Pascal, BRexx, QBASIC) (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 10.04.2020, 07:39

> How is this limited and adhoc?
> What is really the problem you need to solve?
> What is it that these can't do?

I was mainly just thinking out loud to myself about various things (portability, extensibility, maintainability).

Native binary compilation is smaller and faster when you know exactly what you want. But it's also an unmodifiable black box, too specific, not generic enough. You know, the advice "Just rebuild the entire app!" is quite naive and not always easy. (For reasonably small DOS programs, maybe. But you know what I mean. It's not extensible.) So I was mostly wondering about a scripting tool to do the same, where only the script text needs changing.

Using inline asm is like a cheat. You can do anything. At that point you might as well almost use (only) raw assembly and not a HLL. (Mild exaggeration, obviously wrong, but you know what I mean: it's very vendor/OEM/machine specific, maybe OS specific, maybe even compiler specific. Not good. Wirth suggests separating all non-portable SYSTEM stuff into separate modules.)

I forgot that you could just write a simple DEBUG script or maybe a small (turnkey?) Forth app. That has some interactivity that I was wanting without being completely closed and hidden, without being huge and requiring megabytes of non-standard compiler bloat just to fix, extend, or rebuild.

P.S. This is not a complaint against TP versus other languages or implementations or an argument of compilers versus interpreters. If anything, I wonder about writing such an interpreter in TP! I'm just comparing various ways of doing low-level stuff for DOS. If possible, one should use already-available scripting languages pre-installed with the OS for optimal deployment, no? QBASIC at least used to be pre-installed, same with (DOS) DEBUG. Not sure if PC-DOS' REXX could handle such low-level stuff, though.

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Complete thread:

in/out Ports in HLLs (e.g. Turbo Pascal, BRexx, QBASIC) - Rugxulo, 09.04.2020, 04:05 (Developers)
- in/out Ports in HLLs (e.g. Turbo Pascal, BRexx, QBASIC) - marcov, 09.04.2020, 12:27
  - in/out Ports in HLLs (e.g. Turbo Pascal, BRexx, QBASIC) - Rugxulo, 10.04.2020, 07:39
    - in/out Ports in HLLs (e.g. Turbo Pascal, BRexx, QBASIC) - marcov, 10.04.2020, 14:19
      - Perl changes - Rugxulo, 26.06.2020, 01:37