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Re: [TowerTalk] DOS?

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] DOS?
From: jimlux <jimlux@earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2016 08:20:58 -0700
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 10/13/16 7:57 AM, TexasRF--- via TowerTalk wrote:
John, that is exactly the scenario here. All of the programs  tested work
just fine on several Windows 32 bit o/s I have tried.

I was hoping to find a workaround. The dos emulator I tried sort of worked
in parts of the program but the added latency caused parts of the program
to  fail.

Poking around the Windows files, I see a folder called system32 that was
recently created and has several dozen files in it. Makes me wonder if there
is  the possibility of using a different set of files for 16/32 bit
applications.  Probably a good way to disable a perfectly good computer!

I am way overdue to improve my programming skill set to convert to real
Windows type programs  but I can't seem to muster up the courage to get
started yet.

I need a pep talk!


I would suggest that rather than trying to keep up with the ever changing VB/VC++/VC#/.net world that you bite the bullet and learn python or ruby.

Both are a combination of compiled/interpreted, but usually used as the latter
Both have good interactive environments to do development and testing in
Both are easy to do a "hello world"

Python has an enormous number of specialized libraries available for numerical and signal processing stuff(scipy, numpy, matplotlib, etc.). Both have copious facility for doing string handling, formatting, binary file manipulation, etc.

There's a variety of GUI libraries for Python (QT, for instance), but like all GUI libraries, there's a learning curve - there's probably a nice "drag and drop" environment for this like there is for Visual-X, but I've not spent much time on it.



Python has good support on little microcontroller boards (Beaglebone, Raspberry Pi) and there are libraries to talk to external hardware - it's as simple as the Arduino "digitalWrite(pin#, value)"

Most important, they are basically OS/platform independent - I write code (mostly in Python) that runs on Windows (XP,7, 10), Mac OSX, and Linux without any changes other than the naming of things like serial ports ("COMx:" on Windows, /dev/ttyUSB0 on Linux, /dev/ttyxxx on Mac) (pyserial is your friend)

Python is a bit weird at first, because block structure is done with indenting, not curly braces or "begin/end" syntax.
Ruby is more traditional, block structure is "begin/end"

I've not done much hardware interfacing or numerical computation with Ruby so I don't know what is available - I use python for numerical stuff (moving away from Matlab/Octave)

I've used Ruby (recently) for more "scripting" applications because a tool we have at work requires it. Normally, i've been doing my scripting stuff in Python (moving away from Batch files/Powershell on Windows, and bash on Mac/Linux)



Ruby:
~ jimlux$ irb
irb(main):001:0> puts "hello world"
hello world
=> nil
irb(main):007:0> def abc(n)
irb(main):008:1>   for i in 0..n
irb(main):009:2>     puts i
irb(main):010:2>   end
irb(main):011:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):012:0> abc(3)
0
1
2
3
=> 0..3
irb(main):013:0> exit



Python:
~ jimlux$ python
>>> print "hello world"
hello world
>>> def abc(n):
...   for i in range(n):
...     print i
...
>>> abc(3)
0
1
2
>>> quit()
~ jimlux$



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