Why is the homebrew scene on the Amiga not as impressive...

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Can't get Swift for the Amiga...

Soon you will:
https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29

"In addition to new features, the big news is that Apple will be making Swift open source later this year.
[...]
Swift source code will be released under an OSI-approved permissive license.
Contributions from the community will be accepted — and encouraged.
At launch we intend to contribute ports for OS X, iOS, and Linux.
Source code will include the Swift compiler and standard library.
We think it would be amazing for Swift to be on all your favorite platforms."

Swift relies on LLVM for code generation so once the 68k backend is functional it will be able to support the Amiga.

It has anonymous functions, closures, enum types, and allows for much better functional style than C++ while still staying quite close to the metal.

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

Strange though, that someone can mention that they are remaking Sinclair BASIC and no-one says they are re-inventing the wheel... i'm practically re-inventing the jet engine, by comparison.

Writing on BASIC wastes too much of my energy and I fully agree with all your posts on the topic. I am fairly sure that if posts could be voted up yours would be high enough to be counted as representative.

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

The problem of the Amiga community is too many consumers, not enough software producers. . There are very good producers, StingRay, Galhahad, Phx, etc. but we need more and new tools.

Yes, but to become as good a coder as StingRay, Gallahad, phx etc. (whom shall now thereafter be referred to as "semi-gods") takes alot of time and experience, with the semi-gods having atleast 10+ years more experience coding on the Amiga (in assembler) than me. I have only been coding in assembler since around 2007/8, whereas the semi-gods have (as I understand it) been doing so since the early 90's (or longer).

As for new tools, everyone wants something different. There are already some interesting tools (good and bad) on Aminet and other sources on the internet.
I wasn't particularly keen on those I found and ended up coding by own. But whilst I am happy with my tools, I'm sure atleast half of the folks in this thread will see them and go "I'd prefer to have it done this way..."
It takes alot of time coding up new tools, and that is time that the individual might prefer to spend on making the game. However sometimes it is unavoidable as tools can make level (re)designing so much faster and easier


And, for what it's worth, I much prefer the syntax in BASIC just the way it is.
I personally don't understand lines such as:

For I in A ...

I in A? If I=1 what does A equal? 1?

[Megol]

Originally Posted by beezle

Yaaaawn.

Once again, semantics.
Same could be said for c and derivatives.
Things evolve.

Ironic that despite the above even you refer to "modern basics" in some posts ;-)

If you fail to understand why this isn't "semantics" this discussion can't lead anywhere.

Also why do you find my use of modern BASICs to represent the superset of BASIC inspired languages ironic? You can't have read what I actually wrote.

BTW I like BASIC, I learned programming in BASIC and think extended BASICs can be useful. That doesn't mean my complaints are mere semantics...

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

And, for what it's worth, I much prefer the syntax in BASIC just the way it is.
I personally don't understand lines such as:

For I in A ...

I in A? If I=1 what does A equal? 1?

If it's anything like Javascript, it means that if A is a collection such as a variable-length array or linked-list, each time through the loop it will equal the value that is in the next element of A. Python's For loop is exclusively this type to the point that it doesn't support the old fashioned way at all (or at least not directly)!

For I in ["Alphabet", "soup", "contains", "vegetables"]
  print I
Next I

Would output:
Alphabet
soup
contains
vegetables

For some mythical BASIC with this type of For loop (more commonly known as ForEach in general or ForAll in AmigaE).

In Python, for example, if you want to count from 1 to 30, you do something like this:

for x in range(30):
  print x

(Note that anything ending with a colon indicates the start of a block and the indent level marks the extent of the block.)

[Megol]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

And, for what it's worth, I much prefer the syntax in BASIC just the way it is.
I personally don't understand lines such as:

For I in A ...

I in A? If I=1 what does A equal? 1?

So you just doesn't like a BASIC that supports that syntax?

FOR I=0 TO 100

Using the same logic you applied to the above example this should change the definition of 0 to 1.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by waltc

I can't help but hearken back to AmigaVision and the massive potential that it had... (Especially compared with Visual Basic, etc.) I did some amazing stuff with that program & 16 mb's ram... What potential there was! Arexx was another favorite thing of mine, in a scripting program called T-Rexx Professional--the stuff that was possible to cobble together using the Arexx ports in various programs--to effect more or less "real-time" stuff (suitable for tape BetaMax recording) was amazing...! Even to this day with the amazing strides in hardware we've seen I'm not sure these programs really have any equals.

AREXX ports were my favorite use of the Flow Editor in AmigaVision 2 as well, Mainly because there were bugs in almost every other aspect of the program!

Re:Visual languages
I'd rather write a graphical editor as a child class of a BOOPSI tree gadget than to have to write a parser. With a graphical programming environment I'll just say hello to IFFParse.library! Since AmigaVision defined its own private IFF CODE file format, I'd have to come up with a separate IFF PRG0 format with the final digit being the release version of the format.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Soon you will:
https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29

"In addition to new features, the big news is that Apple will be making Swift open source later this year.

Well, i still don't like them apples. Anyway i've been developing this idea since refactoring Mr Beanbag, and there's one thing in particular i need to be able to do, which is to load interchangeable modules/classes at runtime, without having to resort to reflection (like Java does). Maybe you can tell me if Swift has anything like this or not, but i've come up with the idea of "statically implemented interfaces" to solve the problem.

Writing on BASIC wastes too much of my energy and I fully agree with all your posts on the topic. I am fairly sure that if posts could be voted up yours would be high enough to be counted as representative.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

For some mythical BASIC with this type of For loop (more commonly known as ForEach in general or ForAll in AmigaE).

Mythical???

I beg to differ!

D.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Lonewolf10

I personally don't understand lines such as:

For I in A ...

I in A? If I=1 what does A equal? 1?

just recalling the original example...
Let A=0 To 10 Step 2 For I in A ...A equals "0 To 10 Step 2", or to put it another way, [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10]
The suggestion is to allow users to assign ranges to variables (and use type inference to allow different types to be assigned to variables).
One could just as easily write it in-line, of course, like so:

For I in 0 To 10 Step 2

where the only difference there between that and normal BASIC syntax is the use of "in" instead of "="; because it is not assigning I to the range, but to each element in the range in turn. Thus the symbols "To" and "Step" have meanings of their own, and are not just part of For's special syntax.

[Dunny]

Or in SpecBAS:

10 FOR EACH i IN [0 TO 10 STEP 2]: PRINT i: NEXT i



D.

[Mrs Beanbag]

how about

> Let A=0 To 10 Step 2
> Print "Hello world!"(A)
Hlowrd

[Megol]

IMHO such use of ranges makes the code less readable, repetition should always be explicit. How about:

let A=0 to 10 step 2
do print "Hello world!"(A)

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Megol

IMHO such use of ranges makes the code less readable, repetition should always be explicit. How about:

let A=0 to 10 step 2
do print "Hello world!"(A)

i think you miss the point... it doesn't repeat the "print", it applies the range to the string.

[Retro1234]

B=A*2
I always think if you keep it simple and "conform" it should make it easier to port, well thats my theory(probably a load of ...)

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

how about

> Let A=0 To 10 Step 2
> Print "Hello world!"(A)
Hlowrd

This has to be one of the worst syntax mindf*cks I have seen in a while

[Leffmann]

It's perfectly valid in C and C++, so it's not exactly new. It's just a consequence of string literals evaluating to arrays.

[Lonewolf10]

Originally Posted by Megol

So you just doesn't like a BASIC that supports that syntax?

I didn't like it because I didn't understand it.


Thanks to Samurai's explanation I think I understand it (though Mrs Beanbags example I find confusing, but it could just be me being sleepy...)

Originally Posted by Megol

FOR I=0 TO 100

Using the same logic you applied to the above example this should change the definition of 0 to 1.

That was not my intention. I completely understand that because I have used FOR... NEXT loops many times when programming in BASIC on the Amiga, Spectrum and (very briefly) Acorn BBC Micro and Acorn Archemedes.

It's the use of "in" that I'm not used to

For I in A ...
and would be much better if you changed the "in" to "="

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding what it does...

I'll have to try some experiments in Visual BASIC tomorrow

[Dunny]

That's why I use the square brackets.

"FOR i IN a" is pretty bad syntax for a BASIC - it's very non-obvious what it does unless you specify that "a" is a range somehow. The same way we differentiate strings from numbers with the "$" suffix. Hence I would use "FOR i IN [a]" to specify a range, which is more readable so long as the user understands that anything in square braces is a range.

D.

[Mrs Beanbag]

but then it will be a range of a range... does it make sense to write [[0 to 10]]?

what you would usually do, in other languages, is give all your variables descriptive names, rather than cryptic things like "A".

For I in MyRange

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Leffmann

It's perfectly valid in C and C++, so it's not exactly new. It's just a consequence of string literals evaluating to arrays.

That's not what I mean, but thank you for your comment nonetheless.