first post?

I’ve been messing around with RISC OS since January and I like it so I’m going to start being involved in the forum here!

Welcome aboard. Some of us have been using this OS for over 30 years, so it’s got something… but I’m not sure I can satisfactorily define what. :-)

Subliminal messages buried deep within the boot process?

I started using it recently…2016?…and despite having BBC Micros at school we never did get any of the fancy new Acorn machines so I didn’t use it back in the 1990s at all.

I have access to a MacBook, slightly aging Linux laptop and am forced to use Windows at work but RISC OS is the only one I actually enjoy using….and no I don’t know why either!

My only gripe is that I don’t have enough spare time to actually develop more programs for it!

What are you using RISC OS for Willard? I’m sure others would be interested to hear you post in the “What are you doing with RISC OS?” sticky thread…

Others would come up with similar comments, but for me it was my first GUI based OS (second if you count the short period of Arthur use).
Windows 3.0 appeared a while later and was, despite being light years better than 1.0 and 2.0, pretty crap¹. Win3.11 was what I would say was the first usable version² and Win95 had me feeling a certain amount of deja-vu.

¹ The judgement of colleagues who hadn’t even seen RO. I saw a demo at the local football stadium. I was invited to try it out and the sale boys were amazed I knew how to drive a mouse. Massively unimpressed when I crashed the thing irretrievably in no time flat. (Like I said pretty crap)
² OK if you wanted a simple way of switching between DOS apps

I’ve come to RISC OS from a long road of architectures and operating systems. I started with the Tandy CoCo 3 (brother to the Tano Dragon), then MSDOS, UNIX, back to the CoCo, various HP-BASICs, CP/M, TRS80 Model 100 (cousin to your Z88), and even VMS. I was a CS undergrad for 10 years and now I work fast food. I hope that RISC OS’s WIMP will be the GUI that teaches me to love GUI programming.

I hope that RISC OS’s WIMP will be the GUI that teaches me to love GUI programming.

10 END=&A000:Q%=&8300:SYS&400C0,200,&4B534154,"Erm":P%=Q%+4:[OPT2:&400:&400:&1000:&800:&0:&0:&-1:&&FF200012:&&70207:&&C0103:&0:&0:&600:&400:&&3039:&&3000:&1:&0:&&6F6D656E:&&79617320:&&73:&1:&0:&0:&600:&400:&&70030B9:&&69206F4E:&&6F772074
20 &&74916E:]SYS&400C1,,Q%+4TOH%:!Q%=H%:SYS&400C5,,Q%:WHILE1:SYS&400E1,&1830,Q%,TIME+10TOR%:SYS&400FC,H%,,RND(100),RND(100),500+RND(100),300+RND(100):SYS&400D1,H%,,,600,400:IFR%>15ANDQ%!16=0ORR%=3ELSEIFR%=2:SYS&400C5,,Q%:ENDWHILE:ELSEENDWHILE

And if you can’t be bothered to type that in….

Haha! Love it! :—)

I did some stuff in C about a year ago which proved to be quite successful but it is very different to desktop programming on other operating systems!

Overall quite an enjoyable experience though.

When I next get my machine booting I’ll let you know what I used to get started but for now I simply can’t remember…

ROTFL! Honestly this is the biggest thing I love about RISC OS!
It’s 2018, man. You post some BASIC code to any other forum about 32-bit machines
and you’ll get shamed so hard your ancestors will feel it. Here, it’s not a big deal.

(OTOH I hope you have to maintain that code, because ICK! ;-)

You post some BASIC code to any other forum about 32-bit machines

That’s because our BASIC actually does useful things.

OTOH I hope you have to maintain that code, because ICK! ;-)

That was part of the joke, getting that into two lines of BASIC.
Plus it was an excuse for nemo to make another animated GIF. ;-)

That was part of the joke, getting that into two lines of BASIC.

You’ve been a great audience, tell your friends!

It seemed profligate setting the WimpSlot to 8K for that – it would have run in about 5K if that were allowable.

First time I’ve seen a full GUI program in 2-liner! :-) I remember the 1-liners
and 2-liners from the CoCo.

That’s because our BASIC actually does useful things.

ROTFL! (mostly just testing block qoute here…)

First time I’ve seen a full GUI program in 2-liner!

It is technically possible to fit that program into one line of BASIC, using a technique that was popular on the Sinclair ZX81. ;-)

using a technique that was popular on the Sinclair ZX81

Let me guess: either use of IF:THEN:ELSE in an unorthodox way, or putting the keywords in as their tokens to squeeze more into the line length limit? Or both, of course.

No, pre-seeding the memory. Most of the two-liner is window and icon definition. That can be predefined such that when a program says DIMQ%255 it already has a window definition in Q%. Then the rest fits in one line.

It’s a cheat, because the ‘BASIC program’ actually ends up longer… it’s just that only part of it is the program.

On the ZX80/81 (and presumably the Spectrum too) when you used the command SAVE it saved not only the program, but also all the variable definitions at that moment. So the usual technique was to hand-define all your variables, then SAVE.

I wrote a BASIC processor called Celerity which does an analogous thing – predefines all the variables, PROCs and FNs, and pre-loads any data files too, then saves the whole thing out. As a result the variable definitions, data loading and even the DEFs can be missed out, and the PROC/FN/variable linked lists were created in most-used order (which was important before BASIC was modified to use MRU lists).

On the ZX80/81 (and presumably the Spectrum too) when you used the command SAVE it saved not only the program, but also all the variable definitions at that moment.

I did not know that. Interesting. In LISP and APL they call that saving
the “workspace”. I’d never heard of a BASIC doing that.

As the ZX80 & ZX81 shipped with a whole 1024 bytes of RAM, every little helped.

I had a Memotech 64KB RAM pack on my ZX81 and thought I was NASA.

I ended up with four ZX81s, as the hopeless little heatsink was never good enough and the regulator would fry. I arranged three dead ones up the wall in classing ‘flying duck’ formation.

Why did I keep buying them?

Monster Maze. The dreaded sound of feet approaching!

CONT

Or was it GOTO? When you got eaten the program just stopped, you were supposed to RUN it again (as I recall). You could continue though, and then there was no monster.

Here’s a bit of fun for BBC BASIC gurus… guess what the following will output before trying it:

P.001E001E0110E01

You learn something new every day.

Those of us raised on Fortran are used to things like that. You learn partly from the manual, but mostly by trying things. At least you don’t have to wait for your overnight run to see the results nowadays.

It did exactly what I expected…

That said, I had to try it. I wasn’t 100% confident…

For extra confusion, put some -s in.

I did not know about the hard-wired two digit exponent limit until I fell upon it in the code. Although E38 is the limit that will fit, I was still surprised that E038 is parsed the way it is – it takes more code to be less permissive!

I did not know about the hard-wired two digit exponent limit until I fell upon it in the code.

I saw it, but only because I, too, had studied the code to try to reproduce it. BASIC VI has a 3 digit limit, I think.

There is practically no information in the BASIC manual about entering numbers, even in the new version, and it has not got into my StrongHelp manual until this moment. ;-)