First post, by tinybc
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- Newbie
Hi, i don't want to spam, but there has to be some way to let you know. Tiny BASIC for Curses now works in DOSBox.
Tiny BASIC is the minimal possible programming language which was used on early microcumputers, and it takes almost no time to learn. There is almost nothing to forget when one once would not use it any more. It is for Curses, a character screen handling library, which is a POSIX standard, and is in fact the only standard for anything which resembles "graphics". That BASIC also enables to execute external commands, thus it enables both file i/o and enables to do some scripting, including communicating with the Internet. And Tiny BASIC is not so restricted as one may think, it is tiny as a programming language and interpreter, but has a huge array which can be used for storing both numbers and texts.
Why do i think that anyone should be interested. I fully agree with the idea of DOSBox, it is only for games and thus DOS should be minimal. There are no proper tools, no Qt, there is some web browser, but even no word processor. So it makes no sense to use it for anything advanced. But a minimal programming language makes sense in DOSBox, for these who learn programming, or just don't want to vex their brains with yet another programming language, but still want to do some programming. So one may also consider it as yet another game, and DOSBox is for games. Yet one may also use DOSBox as the most minimal operating system, one which is not too complex for most people. DOS is the only widely used operating system which was also used in older microcomputers, some of which were older than pc. Yes people want simplicity, this is not yet comprehended enough.
I played with DOSBox a bit, and from ibiblio http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos (especially gnuish there) i got quite a decent set of command line utilities, the ones which can be executed as external commands in Tiny BASIC. I even got a small unix sh shell, so now there is a name completion instead of typing in all the names, which used to be a nuisance in DOS, and there are also pipes. The things were not so good what concerns programming languages though. I couldn't install python, because the version there uses some long file names which DOSBox doesn't support. There was a small perl, but perl is quite a mess of a programming language. None of these are really easy to learn for beginners. There were also quite small ruby and lua interpreters, if one wants to use ruby or lua, i don't use them and am not going to learn them.
There were also a few BASICs, yet all of them quite complex. I see the only reason why one should use BASIC, is that it is easy to learn. So one can use it to learn programming or do programming with not much effort. I see no reason in using the BASICs which are almost as complex as perl or python. What concerns old BASIC games, there are also ports of some classic BASIC games included in tinybc. Want to play startrek? Well...
Tiny BASIC for Curses is an open source cross-platform interpreter, which means that it works in all widely used operating systems. I also made a package with binaries (executables) for DOS, but i don't want to add binaries for different platforms in SourceForge file mirrors. So i need a place to upload it. But the folks in FreeDOS are now rather interested in decreasing the number of programs in FreeDOS and not adding any new software. Or maybe some of them are willing. So if someone here can suggest a place where i can upload a DOS binary package of Tiny BASIC for Curses, then it would be great of course.
By now you can download tinybc binary package for DOS from SourceForge here http://tinybc.sourceforge.net/tinybc08.zip .
