Re: Back & Forth - The effects of nuclear weapons

On 14/05/2025 3:51 pm, anthk wrote:

On 2025-02-08, Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> wrote:

What do you do when you want to preserve a thirty year old spaghetti
code BASIC program? Of course, if you have no intention whatsoever to
maintain it, you could of course just use a compatible interpreter. Or
you could do it the hard way by trying to analyze it and port it to Forth.
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj2z8pGCFbQ
>
Hans Bezemer

 
I'd love Basic Computer Games' examples among Missile.BAS from CP/M 2.2
being ported to Forth...

The occasions I've ported programs from other languages to Forth the resulting
code has always been disappointingly identical to the original.

Moore once said something to the effect: 'Don't give me your code, tell me
the algorithm and I'll code it.'  I took this to mean he didn't want to be
influenced by existing code.  I was recently put in the same situation...

A Forth application relied upon a small tool the author had written in C.
I had no end of trouble compiling the thing and resolved to rewrite the tool
in Forth.  But what little I once knew about C had vanished in the years
since.  The C source was all but useless to me.  Armed with data samples I
determined what the code did.  The resulting tool in Forth looked (to my
eyes anyway) exactly right.  I doubt I'd feel the same were it a translation
of the C.

p.s. the C tool I finally managed to compile had been developed on a UNIX/
Linux system.  I was using Windows.  Unbeknown to me the difference was
enough to sometimes cause corrupted data files.  I discovered this only
after I had the Forth tool up and running!