Hello again, been away for a while

[p_m21987]

Hello,

I've been away for a while, just because my life has been so busy, and my little bit of free programming time has been spent working on my own programming language project 'JohnsonScript'.
But I still love BBC BASIC and I'm hoping to do some programming in it again.

I recently wrote a pentomino puzzle solver in JohnsonScript, I'm planning on porting that to BBC BASIC for BBCSDL. I'll probably be working on that and posting it sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Here's a couple screenshots:
http://dusthillresident.ddns.net/folder ... _14_24.png
http://dusthillresident.ddns.net/folder ... _14_29.png
Source code: https://github.com/dusthillresident/Joh ... solver.txt

I'm really glad to see the forum's still up and that BB4W and BBCSDL are still in development, massive respect to you Richard for the awesome work. Hope you're doing well.

Regards,
- Patty

[Pete]

Hi p_m21987 good to see you here.

I saw the screenshots for Pentomino puzzle, that is very impressive.

JohnsonScript programming language sounds good. Years ago I had a job as a computer programmer for a radio station equipment manufacturer called Audix Broadcast. I was programming in a scripting language which the subcontractor programmer had written, it drove how the mixing desks etc worked when a fader was opened. Are you writing your language using BBC Basic?

[p_m21987]

Years ago I had a job as a computer programmer for a radio station equipment manufacturer called Audix Broadcast. I was programming in a scripting language which the subcontractor programmer had written, it drove how the mixing desks etc worked when a fader was opened.

That sounds really cool! How long ago was this? I'm curious about what the computers at the time were like, if they were more modern like what we use today or if it was like 1980s/1990s technology.

Are you writing your language using BBC Basic?

Nope, my language is implemented in C; the interpreter is written in C and I also made a trans-compiler that generates C code.
JohnsonScript is quite fast. In my tests, the interpreter is generally faster than Python, and is usually considerably faster than the BASIC interpreters available for AMD64 linux.

[Pete]

Re the script language programming job I had this was around 1996 - if I've got the year right, I do remember PC's running at 33MHz and 50MHz, running Windows 3.1. Monitors were CRTs. The firm I worked for had an A4 colour laser, which I think back then was more than £2,000 to buy. It was around the time of "386" then "486"s coming out. I learnt some C back then but didn't pursue it, I remember it being very fiddly with case and syntax. Good luck with JohnsonScript, what are the best intended applications of this programming language?