Posted by jpluimers on 2025/08/20
With the constant influx of JavaScript programmers, it keeps worth repeating that you should always run JavaScript in strict mode via "use strict"; (like in the past Visual Basic 6 developers should use option strict and option explicit) to forget risky JavaScript syntax like implicit ocal constants (which were removed from the documentation in the 2009 ECMAScript 5 specification for JavaScript), and every codeline should have a test code covering it, especially for comparisons involving non-strict behaviour like the use of leading zeros.
As of the succeeding 2015 standard (ECMAScript 6), octal numbers in JavaScript start with 0o or 0O followed by a series of octal digits.
Oh, and the history of octal in computing of course has to do with 6-bit systems and also lead to 6-six bit character codes including BCD character encoding..
My tweet back earlier this year: [WaybackSave/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “@_ObomheseR Since JavaScript is in the group of curly based programming languages influenced by the B programming language, integer constants starting with zero are tried first in octal base. 017 octal is 15 decimal 018 octal is not possible, so becomes 18.”
Inhteritence:
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Posted in B, BASIC, C, Development, JavaScript/ECMAScript, MarkDown, Retrocomputing, Scripting, Software Development, VB6, Visual BASIC | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/23
Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Applesoft BASIC, BASIC, Development, History, Mastodon, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/03/20
This was a trip down memory lane where I was totally unaware that you could embed 6502 assembly language inside AppleSoft BASIC code.
It turns you can, and even better: the Twitter bot named AppleIIBot could execute it too!
Though I bumped into AppleIIBot during winter 2021, I published the BBC equivalent last week (see BBC trip down memory lane – 8bitkick/BBCMicroBot: Runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator) as that one got released earlier.
For the moment it is down because Elon blew up Twitter and shut down on 2022-11-05, but hopefully – like the BBC equivalent – it will resurface on a Mastodon instance somewhere in the future.
Luckily all old Tweets with code and rendering are still there, though you need a Twitter account to view them: Elon broke the feature of anonymous access seeing all messages in a thread.
Below the signature are the full Tweets that led me into it; the texts are these:
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Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, BASIC, Development, History, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/03/13
I am publishing this in order of the Twitter bot Social bots appearing, though I found this one later than the Apple ][ equivalent:
[Wayback/Archive] 8bitkick/BBCMicroBot: Runs your tweet on an 8-bit computer emulator which is a GitHub repository with full source code.
The odd thing is that I bumped into it while performing a [Wayback/Archive] bot that reads unicode – Twitter Search / Twitter (I was looking for a bot responding to fancy Unicode in account names and messages that makes using Twitter for visually impaired a pain to use wich I covered in To make Twitter a better place for visually impaired: please do without those fancy Unicode letters in your account and messages – Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2022 – #a11y).
It made me find this thread stat started in spring 2022:
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Posted in 6502, 6502 Assembly, Assembly Language, BASIC, BBC Micro B, Development, History, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter, TwitterBot | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/07
Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of indirection atop assembly. Alas, the popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable. I’ve gone through some common features that probably should’ve stayed in C and my justification for saying so. The features are listed in rough order from (I hope) least to most controversial. The idea is that C fans will give up when I call it “weakly typed” and not even get to the part where I rag on braces. Wait, crap, I gave it away.
Great re-read towards the end of the year: [WayBack] Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad
Via: [WayBack] Old and busted: emacs vs vi. New and hot: Language war, everybody against everybody else. – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+
–jeroen
Posted in .NET, APL, Awk, bash, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CoffeeScript, CommandLine, D, Delphi, Development, F#, Fortran, Go (golang), Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Pascal, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, PowerShell, Python, Ruby, Scala, Scripting, Software Development, TypeScript, VB.NET, VBScript | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/11/02
Quoted in full because even 2.5 years later, it’s just too funny:
- Python: What if everything was a dict?
- Java: What if everything was an object?
- JavaScript: What if everything was a dict *and* an object?
- C: What if everything was a pointer?
- APL: What if everything was an array?
- Tcl: What if everything was a string?
- Prolog: What if everything was a term?
- LISP: What if everything was a pair?
- Scheme: What if everything was a function?
- Haskell: What if everything was a monad?
- Assembly: What if everything was a register?
- Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?
- COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?
- C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?
- Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?
- Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END
- C++: What if we added everything to the language?
- C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?
- Rust: What if garbage collection didn’t exist?
- Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?
- Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?
- Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?
- PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?
- VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?
- VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?
- Forth: What if everything was a stack?
- ColorForth: What if the stack was green?
- PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?
- XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?
- Make: What if everything was a dependency?
- m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?
- Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?
- Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?
- Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?
- Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?
- Malbolge: What if there is no god?
–jeroen
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Posted in .NET, APL, Assembly Language, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, Development, EPS/PostScript, Fun, Go (golang), Java, Java Platform, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LISP, Makefile, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Quotes, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Scripting, Smalltalk, Software Development, T-Shirt quotes, TCL, Turbo Prolog, VB.NET, Visual BASIC, XML/XSD, XSLT | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/04/09
mos6502 wrote a really nice post on G+ with this quote:
“This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.”
A must read if you ever used Microsoft BASIC on a 6502 machine.
Lots of link to various sources of the Microsoft BASIC (it was developed on a PDP-10 that could even run the outputed 6502 assembly!)
–jeroen
via: We’ve already had some posts on the BASIC programming language for the 6502,….
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Posted by jpluimers on 2014/05/01
Though a lot of people dislike the language, it survived until today.
So: happy 50th birthday BASIC!
BASIC Begins at Dartmouth
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall, Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs, time-sharing and BASIC were born.
–jeroen
via:
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 