AppBasic

I tried a year or two ago to contact Joe Taylor about AppBasic but no joy. Anyone know if it’s still alive? Or anyone in touch with him to get permission to continue development?

I also tried to contact him without joy. Would be a shame to see AppBasic fall by the wayside. If anyone knows a more recent contact address, please let us know.

Can’t help, other than observing that the defunct mailing list has been unavailable since at least early 2009.

I put out a request on c.s.a. misc
I recall there being some good articles on AppBasic in Qercus.
I’ll tweet John Cartmell to see if he can help.

A colleague of my wife at Brighton Museum, who knows Joe’s wife, says that Joe has been ill. His landline telephone number appears no longer to be valid.

Thanks for the info, Gavin. What a shame. If you get a chance to pass some best wishes for a speedy recovery up the grapevine, please do so.

Thanks for the news, Gavin. I’ve used Joe’s DrawScript / DrawBasic a couple of times with stunning results.
By the way; thought your article in the new Archive on JIT was very informative; greatly enjoyed reading it.

That’s a shame. I don’t want to be crass, Gavin, but do you think we should pursue this and see if we can get the software for further development? Or is this best left alone for now? It’s such excellent work, it seems a shame for it not to come along and enjoy the ride into Raspberry Pi land and future developments.

Joe was a colleague of mine at Sussex University. He was the first person to use microcomputers for teaching in the UK. After his retirement we kept very much in touch. He developped DrawBasic and then AppBasic over a number of years. He spent a huge amount of time updating and improving them. He must be one of the most knowledgable users of the Toolbox.
I am trying to find out whether he still lives. In any case I am sure he would want to see his efforts carried on to a new generation of RISC OS machines.

How funny that you know Joe personally, Gavin, as I was thinking only a couple of days ago how great it would be if AppBasic could evolve into AppBuster (or something less brash ;) and generate the sort of veneers it does for BASIC for other languages. Lua was the first one that sprang to mind!

See http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.sys.acorn.programmer/2007-10/msg00187.html
where Joe himself points this out. Joe would tell me about his ideas for AppBasic and I would tell him about RiscLua. I held off developing Toolbox veneers for RiscLua because, 1) I did not want to poach, and 2) Joe knew a heck of a lot more about the toolbox than I do.
Joe is an amazing person. He was a student of A.C.Aitken at Edinburgh where he got his expertise in numerical methods. His father-in-law was Lord Elwyn Jones. He was always involved in politics, most recently as a member of the SNP.

Thanks Gavin, for the info – let us know if you find anything more about Joe’s whereabouts – hope he’s well.

Gavin (same Gavin as above – had to create a new account to change email address!)

I am happy to say that Joe is well. He has been busy with politics the last couple of years and has been away from RISC OS. His seeming disappearance is due to a combination of accidents, chiefly my mistyping his telephone number when entering it into my database. He says he will try and sort out the multiple filters he has protecting his email, because he fears that some are tagging as spam what they should not. Also he hopes to return soon to the RISC OS fold.
I will get on to him about the creation of an ARM7-compatible version of AppBasic.

This is great news! If you could please consider asking Joe about RPi distribution permissions at the same time that’d be very helpful.

Thanks for your update Gavin and glad to hear he’s well! An ARMv6*/ARMv7 save version of AppBasic certainly would be most welcome. Come to think of it: AppLua would be quite exciting too ;-)

*as used in the R-Pi’s ARM 11

Joe said that there are no problems about distribution permissions on DrawScript and AppBasic. I guess we can wait to have it explicitly from him. In my email to him two minutes ago I pointed out that there could be ARMv6/7 compatibility problems and AppBasic would need recompiling. The DrawScript module will need to be made 32-bit compatible, too, if it has not already been.
I have an email address for him, but he does not want it made public quite yet
until he has his filters sorted.

Excellent! This is good news!

Excellent Gavin, great news, AppBasic is quite a little asset to the platform.

This is being written on an Android tablet. Gavin rang me earlier this evening and (hopefully) I have now fixed the problem with my email filtering. Apologies to those who have been trying to contact me.

Great to hear from you Joe – I know you’re very busy but would you consider reopening your mailing list?

Fantastic news! Good to see you here, Joe ;)

If it could be recompiled for ARMv7 compatibility, I think AppBasic should definitely be on the R-Pi disc image.

I think that for the Pi it needs to be ARMv6, BIRTRTBW

Many thanks for the kind words above. I’ve been away from programming for the last couple of years and am a bit rusty so please make allowances. Also replies may be slightly slow in coming – the amount of time I currently have available is limited.

I am perfectly happy that AppBasic and DrawScript should be distributed as suggested above. Please note that the AppBasic package contains some third party software (i.e. not mine). If recollection serves I think it may only be ResEd and StrongBS (compression application) for which further permssions may need to be sought. Perhaps there are others.

Compilation: AppBasic has been compiled using ABC compiler. The underlying program is written in clean BASIC using SWI calls to standard modules. (By ‘standard module’ I mean that you don’t have to RMEnsure its presence in a !Run file). AppBasic makes heavy use of recursive programming. AppBasic should therefore run on all versions of RISCOS which can run ABC compiled programs.

I don’t think the same can be said for DrawScript which, if memory serves, grabs memory in a non-standard way. This may need to be revisited to make DrawScript run on all systems.

AppBasic maillist. Sounds a good idea and I will consider doing this.

Joe, many thanks for the info and also thanks for considering the mailing list.

AppBasic maillist
It turns out that the AppBasic maillist became broken when the webhost moved the jettons account to a different server. {Apparently due to a ‘bug’ which can arise with Cpanel and the list software Mailman )

The AppBasic list will have to be rebuilt – probably with a different email address (e.g. maillist@appbasic.jettons.co.uk or toolbox@jettons.co.uk).

If anyone would be interested in taking over the management of the list, I would be more than delighted to delegate this to them. A complete novice to maillists can do this. Once setup, a Mailman list virtually runs itself and the main important duty is to notice when, and if, it has ceased to function! :-)