foam3 VS 4.2BSD

Thank you for sharing that video! Your foam project looks fascinating too: https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3

I wrote a BASIC to JS compiler/transpiler that includes all of the programs from "BASIC Computer Games" as examples.

You can try it out in your browser at: https://codepen.io/kgr/full/yLQyLjR

Just select the game you want to to run from the top-left list box, then press the "Compile" button and you'll see the translated JS source in the right text-area. Then press the "Run" button to run it.

The source code for the compiler is available at: https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3/tree/429f2fd2b4cef0e37996a...

Sort of related but an interesting idea is take it one step further with the Feature Oriented Active Modeler (FOAM) [1,2] paradigm and use code to model your whole system, which generates diagrams model, and runnable code in whatever language needed. The project is still young and it may not be practical today with the available tooling but it seems like a cool idea and project. It is influenced by the unix principle of “coding the perimeter not the area” which is essentially factoring your dev tasks into building NM capabilities, but instead of building NM things individually build N+M tools that can be composed into N*M capabilities [2].

So with FOAM the idea is if we want to maintain a model of our software, and build it as well, what if we can use one composable tool to generate both, rather than model everything and code it separately.

[1] https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3

[2] https://foam-framework.github.io/foam/

[3] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ea3pkTCYx4

https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3#videos

FOAM is a modelling framework that generates cross-language boilerplate for you, but it takes a much broader view of what constitutes boilerplate than most systems. Typically, it can generate between 95-98% of a working cross-language cross-tier system.

FOAM helps you create features for modelled data. Features include things like a Java/Javascript/Swift classes to hold your modelled data, code to marshall to/from JSON/XML/CSV/etc., various GUI Views, and support for storing your data in various databases or file formats. However, FOAM models are themselves modelled, meaning they're afforded all of the above benefits as well. This lets you apply the MVC technique of having multiple views work against the same underlying data-model concurrently (say a grid and a pie-chart in a spreadsheet), so that you can choose the best view or views for your current need. When treated this way, your code is no longer text (but it can be, if that's one of your views), and you can easily view and store it in many different ways and more easily programmatically manipulate it.

Not only early Unix; look at the original inet_addr implementation [0]. It accepts not only "0x" but also just "x" as the 16-base prefix, it doesn't really care about the numbers overflowing, and it parses 09 as equal to 011 (which is decimal 9). And the less said about the coding style, the better.

[0] https://github.com/dank101/4.2BSD/blob/master/lib/libc/inet/...

No need to guess. My man page for inet_aton says it comes from 4.3BSD: https://github.com/dank101/4.3BSD-Reno/blob/master/lib/libc/...

The earlier inet_addr from 4.2BSD has the same logic: https://github.com/dank101/4.2BSD/blob/master/lib/libc/inet/...

inet_aton and inet_addr parses addresses the obvious way. Using something like strtoul or especially sscanf would be stilted. The beauty of C pointers is that it makes simple parsing tasks very easy--perhaps too easy.

It probably made sense in 1983.

https://github.com/dank101/4.2BSD/blob/master/include/netdb....