Re: "LisaBBS" / Who knows Lisa font formats?

Eh, if I could learn some 68k asm to write the code, I'm sure someone could learn enough to read it :-)

Still, no real need to read closely because: (a) most of what it does you can find library code, or write a little C, to do
(b) every instruction has a big fat comment next to it

The Lisa Pascal compiler (which is actually a Clascal compiler---there's OO in there!) was written by a company called Silicon Valley Software and licensed? or obtained in some way by Apple. The function and procedure argument capability is listed in the manual as a difference between Apple Pascal and Lisa Pascal. It's a nice feature. I wonder if it came "for free" with some of the technology required for Clascal.

Some discussion on the Clascal Wikipedia "talk page": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AClascal

--Tom

On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 10:57 PM, Brian Connors <connorbd_at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:

>
>
> On Sunday, July 19, 2015 at 10:29:21 PM UTC-4, Tom Stepleton wrote:
>>
>> Hi Brian,
>>
>> A lot of LisaBBS is Lisa-specific. The 68K assembly code is not going to
>> work on ARM, of course, and all the code that talks to the filesystem or
>> works with the serial port targets Lisa OS specifically. Additionally, some
>> of the data that LisaBBS packages in archives that it sends (e.g. the 128k
>> of "label" data, plus some of the filesystem metadata) has no counterpart
>> on a Linux box.
>>
>> There may be an additional problem for would-be porters. Lisa Pascal
>> supports arguments to functions and procedures that are also functions and
>> procedures. I don't know if Free Pascal does this---I'm not sure, but I get
>> the impression that this capability isn't found in most Pascal compilers.
>> (Disclaimer: I've only ever written Pascal code for the Lisa---and the
>> computer science AP test back in the 1990s :-)
>>
>> The implementation of quicksort uses function and procedure arguments
>> pretty extensively, see
>>
>> https://github.com/stepleton/lisabbs/blob/master/LIBSORT.TEXT#L22
>>
>> They turn up elsewhere, too.
>>
>> Fortunately, there's little point to porting LisaBBS to a modern computer
>> running any sort of Linux. You would be much better off writing a very thin
>> Pascal shell (or Python would be even easier) that mimics the simplistic
>> LisaBBS interface and invokes lrzsz
>> <https://ohse.de/uwe/software/lrzsz.html> to send files to the remote
>> system.
>>
>> All rather good to know.
>
> Free Pascal has a tendency to be able to do things that leave you feeling
> rather dirty (like for example setting compiler flags on the fly and
> forcing it to look the other way when you abuse the type checking). I don't
> know for a fact that you can pass functions as arguments, but since it
> supports multiple dialects of Pascal (including Apple Pascal), I wouldn't
> be the least bit surprised if you can. But yeah, the 68K assembly code is a
> definite dealbreaker; it'd probably be a major hassle to find anyone who
> even really understands it anymore.
>
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