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seven programming languages on one floppy (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 03.04.2023, 10:33

> I agree with what you say about bloat, but I'm a bit confused about this
> proposal.
It's not a proposal, just me thinking aloud about it. I'm just saying that some things are less than ideal. There's a reason I want to keep it small.

> AWK is a different language. If you prefer that language fine, but you have
> now compared interpretation to compilation.
I did not mean to imply that AWK (usually written in C) is overall better than C. (There's also REXX, TCL, and others.)

> There are C interpreters. And the Forth thing you quoted said it compiled
> just in time too I think.
I already mentioned PicoC (which I compiled with DJGPP in 2012), which I have sometimes used. It's imperfect but still better than nothing. (Detlef Reimers built a DJGPP version of EiC, which is more compatible with C89.)

> So - what's wrong with either a C interpreter or something that compiles
> your C program before running it?
Nothing's wrong with it. I'm just saying modern GCC isn't quite simple enough for what I want. (Older versions were smaller, e.g. 2.95.3, which I often use.)

TinyC has the -run option. The Win32 version relies on MSVCRT (same as MinGW).

> Also what's wrong with putting the C library in either the OS or in a DLL
> like msvcrt.dll? That will produce a small executable too.
BC-Fortran77 (for DOS, circa 1990) used a TSR for its runtime (needed by both the compiler and .EXEs it produced).

> If you don't like even a few k for a hello world because of the executable
> overhead, then even that can be changed with a simpler executable format.
I'm just saying that a lot of compiled C programs are inefficient for various reasons. (And it's not only C, but C is more popular.)

You know Microsoft got their start with their BASIC. They were well-known for their compilers (and MS-DOS, which was mainly for them to keep selling their compilers to IBM). In some ways I'm comparing languages, but overall it's more just an idea for a good base collection of programming tools, better than the generic "just use GCC" nonsense.

I don't think including DEBUG is enough. I don't think including SubC is enough. I don't think including P5 Pascal is enough. We need good tools, and just one or two won't cut it. (But 130 MB is probably too much.) Look how much cool stuff was done back in the day in (limited) QBASIC. Why can no one do that anymore? Is Python the new BASIC? What happened to Perl? Why are they better than AWK? Turbo C or Turbo Pascal were insanely popular. Why can nothing good be written with them anymore?

Look at Menuet64. Look how much they crammed on their floppy. Look at the QEMU Advent Calendar(s). Look how many cool things work.

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