general question about riscos.
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Steve Drain (222) 1620 posts |
It is also possible to provide an OO model using the Toolbox to program the Wimp from BASIC. The Toolbox is designed as an OO system, but it has a scope limited by the class modules that have been written for it. The range of OO concepts available is also limited to those that have meaning for desktop objects. It is more or less a fixed, not dynamic, system. It is also implemented using SWIs. This has the benefit of making it available to all languages, but hides the essence of the design, which is nowhere made explicit in the manual. In the StrongHelp manual for Basalt I show the inheritance tree more clearly. Do not look to the Toolbox for anything more than it is. It does not form the nucleus of a full-blown OOP environment. As for Basalt, the SWI interface is hidden from the programmer and the OO oriented relationships made explicit, which is something new. Other languages already have OO syntax and could probably integrate the Toolbox seamlessly into that. Just to illustrate what Basalt does, in its limited way, here are some snippets, assuming that objects have been created using ResEd:
The ’ character is necessary for Basalt to start interpreting what follows. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Steve Drain (222) 1620 posts |
Ah! you have not used the Toolbox. ;-) Although objects can be created at runtime from a new template, for most applications the templates for all objects are defined using ResEd, a graphical editor, and they are stored in a Res file. How objects are then created from these templates can be controlled. They may be designated to be created automatically or on demand, but most often objects are attached in an ancestor-parent-child heirarchy and lower objects are created when higher ones are. In the desktop this usually means that the Iconbar object is auto-created and then all the attached windows and menus are auto-created in turn. None of this is language dependent, and the same Res file can be used with C or BASIC, for example. The Toolbox communicates with an application with events returned by Wimp_Poll, and the application deals with methods and attributes using SWIs. You would have to study the manual to see how all this fits together. Specifically, Basalt requires a programmer to register events of interest against functions to be called and then enter the poll loop with the single keyword POLL. It assigns object ids to variables with the name of the object so that they can be easily referenced. Within the program, Basalt interprets lines like those above and uses what the Toolbox offers to implement the methods and attributes. For speed, the method and attribute names are tokenised during translation. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Steve Pampling (1551) 7932 posts |
Two aspects, a core set of work that needed doing and then the second set being a case of people who used it asking for features and those shouting loudest got parts of what they wanted.
Complicated – I will come back to that later.
Acorn had developed the Acorn Risc Machine (ARM), the processor division was worth more than the rest of the company and Olivetti had no vision and sold ARM off and closed down the OS/PC side. The OS rights had been sold to a customer (PACE) and that customer made a licensing agreement with a group labelled ROL allowing ROL to further develop the OS for desktop use only with PACE retaining the head and all embedded rights. ROL employed Justin. That was RO4.02 – 4.3x Some customers wanted a 32 bit compatible OS version to use on newer hardware ROL wanted funding but to retain all rights. One customer company (Castle) went to Pace and employees to ask for a 32 bit version (Pace employees ex-of-Acorn had 32 bitted much of the core). Castles released product (Iyonix) with a 32 bit OS (RO5) caused a bit of a fuss in ROL circles with accusations of illegality.
Technically 3.8. 3.7 was Acorn released for the StrongARM CPU upgrade for the RISC PC
Personality clash and things that are irrelevant. Anyway, moving on… |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
Hardware independence, 32bit/USB/EDID support, a modern TCP/IP stack, modern configuration system, themes, much better sprite support, etc. Not really nothing. Around filesystems, many things could be done. On filecore itself (look at bounties), but also around hardware (trim), volumes (transparent squash compression, encryption or caching for example. Malware protection, etc.), files (framework to ease the development of transparent conversions tools), or even fs (new add-ons for OmniClient, NTFS support, etc.). It would be cool too to get source code of some old projects: web browser, replay, pcem, etc. (Java?). Many many possibilities.
Exactly. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Steve Fryatt (216) 2046 posts |
Sort of. It seems to have been suggested that some of the early ROL changes made it back into the Pace sources under the licence terms, but that this stopped fairly quickly. It’s a bit out of date now, as it was written when ROL were still active and developing RISC OS 6, but WROCC’s Brief History of RISC OS might fill in some of the background. Note that the whole “About RISC OS” section of the site really needs an overhaul to catch up with the past couple of years’ developments… |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Rick Murray (539) 13406 posts |
Just before I got back online. And… yes. Quite a shock.
There was a company called Argonet that repackaged the ANT Internet Suite (well, more or less Fresco and some background stuff) with their own email client, news reader, and front-end dialler. I write QuickVoy to be a less-bloated clone of their dialler (it runs in 128K rather than the painful amount the proper front-end wanted) http://heyrick.co.uk/voyager/quickvoy/index.html Richard Goodwin took over developing the email client, and I took over developing the usenet client (http://heyrick.co.uk/voyager/newsagent/index.html). I’m surprised ROLtd took it over, I would have thought it might have gone to Orpheus (aren’t they what Argonet eventually became? I might be wrong there, I’m missing a ~8 year chunk of history). |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Steve Fryatt (216) 2046 posts |
I think you mean http://www.orpheusnet.co.uk/ |
Rick Murray (539) 13406 posts |
I would say a quiet “yes”. RISC OS itself has maintained a very good degree of compatibility, you can run programs written in BASIC for RISC OS 2 without problems. Well, seriously, some stuff would have to change because a processor able to address 64MiB maximum ain’t gonna cut it these days.
Some. I think some functions (OS_ReadLine ?) would take an address in a register, and also stuff in some flags in the high bits. This is no longer useful as the high bits could be a valid address.
hihihi…
There was a time when his site would include a somewhat impolite message if you visted using a PC. We disagreed quite a bit on that. I believe that demonstrating how RISC OS is better would be more useful than insulting the visitor for not using RISC OS, especially if said user was a RISC OS user borrowing somebody else’s machine. |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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Rick Murray (539) 13406 posts |
Written by Steve Furber. Now, I can’t quite put my finger on the reason, but that name does sound kind of familiar… |
h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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h0bby1 (2567) 480 posts |
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