VOGONS


First post, by 4xtx

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I was recently poking around looking for obscure and obsolete scripting languages for early versions of Windows.
The language structure looks like an ancestoral VBScript..
I found a few references to Oriel and managed to find a download on some random page.
The download is of a demo version and it unfortunately does not contain any reference material.
The only thing I can find is a hard copy book which apparently has a distribution of this demo included.

Why do I want to look into this obscure thing?
It appears to interpret/run under Windows 3.0 in real mode which means I can write some small utility or application without resorting to TPW or Watcom C toolchains.
There are very few programming languages which run/compile in real mode - example; VB did not support real mode at all and rightfully so..
I use real mode in a few projects for XT class projects and it would be neat to have (what appears to be) a comprehensive scripting language available.

What am I looking for specifically?
Reference information! While I can deduce some of the syntax and commands - a proper reference would be helpful.
Original media - there is reference to a "compiler" which would be of great interest
Anyone who has worked with Oriel in the past

YT: https://www.youtube.com/@techdistractions

Reply 1 of 1, by Jo22

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4xtx wrote on 2022-09-27, 07:11:

Why do I want to look into this obscure thing?
It appears to interpret/run under Windows 3.0 in real mode which means I can write some small utility or application without resorting to TPW or Watcom C toolchains.
There are very few programming languages which run/compile in real mode - example; VB did not support real mode at all and rightfully so..

Hi 4xtx, I'm sorry that I can't help you much,
but just want to say that I can relate to what you tell.
There are only a few compilers that can produce real-mode compatible NE executables.
Two others I know are Borland's Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 and its successor, Borland Pascal 7 for Windows.
The others one is even older, it's dBase Fast for Windows (aka dBFast Windows, DBF) by Bumblebee Software.
It's from the late Windows 2.0 days..

Edit: Again, I don't mean to spam your thread. It's just.. It's so rarely happening that someone looks like these things.
I wish you the very best. Hope you get more replies and find out more about Oriel. Good luck! 🙂🤞

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