Acorns & other stuff (was: assembly)

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Robert Speed wrote:

> > BBC BASIC). Sophie said that the majority of the OS "wasn't in
> Yes, I met Roger (as was) during the development of ARX (A 
> Unix(esc) type OS running on an ARM across the tube) - incredibly 
> intelligent person.

I heard about ARX a while ago, never seen it running though. I didn't
realise anyone had put an ARM on the end of a tube, but there we go. I
have access to a Torch up here, which is fun to play with, also got a tube
knocking about somewhere but they're not as fun ;)

> > human-readable form". Sophie was also well-known for not wasting bytes on
> > variable names, labels, etc..... the OS seems to suffer from that too.
> > OSWGBPB being a particularly good example (O.S. word get-byte put-byte).
> This could have been due to having look up tables for various SWI 
> and SYS calls.

Maybe, not sure. I seem to recall they had some dev system which
automatically generated some stuff, and it was more because of this, or
something. But this is delving into the haze, so I'm probably wrong ;). 

> > There's all kind of cruft in the OS caused by this type of programming.
> > It'll be interesting to see what Pace (& the others) do with the Acorn
> > stuff though - I hear they're basically chucking most of it out.
> Maybe so, the font renderer and printing system are probably the 
> only things worth keeping.

Never had contact with Acorn printing, but on the graphics side it's not
to bad. Stuff will still keep happening, if only for Millipede.

> It's still remarkably quick and easy to dev stuff for though, despite 
> not having anywhere as near as many 'features' as Unix or
> (spit.. M$ bloat).

That said (probably true), most people I know dev'ing stuff for Acorns all
use GNU tools, many use UNIX platforms to do it.. I don't particularly
like the Acorn environment myself, but some people swear by it.. (or at it
;)

Cheers,

Alex.


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