Programming languages

Originally Posted by altis

Re Occam: Yep, I used to be the Snr Engineer for Sension Transputer Systems (later to become Kane) who made and sold Transputer based systems. A fantastic British invention that never really caught on. At least it still lives - I recently bought a digital satellite receiver from Lidl and it uses an STi5518 (son of Transputer).

The 13-bit UART was while I was working for Sension Systems. It was for a machine to simulate over 1000 remote outstations so that one of the gas boards could test their telemetry software. It worked at 2400 baud but the software could handle 4800.

The Z80 source code was compiled on a VAX and then the hex output dumped to the terminal screen. The monitor program (only 2Kbyte long!) on the target listened in and poked it to RAM where it was run and debugged. At the time I could assemble stuff in my head and also knew how long each instruction took - in those days we had to write efficient code!

blimey altis, all that and your morris man stuff, too

[nffc]

Can't do anything yet, but want to start.

What's the best / cheapest way to start learning?

[punky]

Originally Posted by nffc

Can't do anything yet, but want to start.

What's the best / cheapest way to start learning?

Choose a "high level language". They are the most english-like, and take less code to do more stuff.

The best one to start with is probably Visual Basic. It is nice and easy, there are plenty of support sites (www.experts-exchange.com and www.codeproject.com and online tutorials as well as MSDN. You can do lots of Windows based programs easily).

That isn't the cheapest one though. If you want a cheap high-level language, you can try Java/Javascript. Both are fully free, and flexible (With Java you can do applications as well as applets. Lots of support sites, java.sun.com, and high level so most people can grasp them easily.

HTH

[Millay]

hmmmm i fell somewhat outdone by everyone but then again im not that old tehe....

I have used in commrcial and bored situations the following some of which is markup and scripting i know...

REXX
QBASIC
VB
VBA
Delphi
Javascript
GML
HTML
PHP
JAVA
SQL - SQLServer... MySQL etc
Batch Scripting all that kinda thing..

I dont get to do much now just the occasional batch scripts and vbscripts for automating tasks...

You'll no where to find me im the one in the corner inadvertently creating infinite loops!

[Richard M]

Originally Posted by nffc

Can't do anything yet, but want to start.

What's the best / cheapest way to start learning?

Start with something like Perl, it's easy to learn and can be very powerful.

[Mr_love_monkey]

Originally Posted by MetaWraith

In Altis I see someone that recognises that just quoting Assembler is useless as it doesnt specify the instruction set or even the family.

ah, I didn't realise we needed to be that specific in that case I used the MIPS R3000 assembly language...

Anyone remember the good old days of Lex, flex, bison and yacc?

Ah, assembler, I forgot about that.

I remember days of fun with 6502 assembler, and then Acorn RISC assembler in later years.