

RISC OS for Raspberry Pi - wiradikusuma
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2338

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ColinWright
FWIW, I have running RISC OS machines that I still use occasionally for the
few applications that had, and have, no peer. I'll be watching closely to see
if any of my older work will be of use to the community.

~~~
qznc
What applications have no peer?

~~~
ColinWright
!Draw, for one. I have yet to find an application that lets me draw things as
quickly and cleanly as that. Anything else that has the same capabilities is a
pig to use in terms of menus, actions, clicks, etc. Other packages that offer
more are often harder to drive and too fussy, and anything that offers less is
usually not good enough for what I want.

!Draw hits the sweet spot, for me, of capability and usability.

~~~
meaty
+1 for !Draw. I nearly cried when I got my first PC which had Paint on it. I
then spent 5 years dredging through various applications and I still haven't
found something better.

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bdfh42
This is all very interesting from a nostalgia viewpoint (the Open VMS cluster
hit that spot for me ;)) but have we seen much in the way of cutting edge OS
work on this device?

The Pi gives us a great experimental platform to explore new possibilities
does it not?

~~~
saw-lau
My own point of view, given its supposed background as an educational tool, is
that this should have been on the device from Day One, and work should never
had been started on it supported Linux. The immediacy of an insta-booting
machine with BASIC is one of the things that cemented my interest in computers
and programming as a ten year old.

I may, of course, just be being nostalgic here...

~~~
wiradikusuma
but some other people are looking forward to use pi for more 'serious'
applications. luckily a quick google revealed that risc os supports lua and
python, although jvm would be nice.

~~~
meaty
I'd argue, having used it extensively in the 80's and 90's, that the BASIC
variant shipped with RISC OS it is _very serious_.

It's a different league to your usual BASIC variants and scales up very well
to large applications and even down to system programming.

It's completely unique and people could learn a lot from how little time it
takes to knock out something useful, fast and powerful in it.

~~~
ColinWright
FWIW, we've developed and supplied safety-critical, soft-real-time
applications in BBC BASIC. It was a genuinely serious language.

I also developed symbolic execution and partial verification systems for it,
and that helped confirm that our systems were appropriate for the context in
which they were used.

~~~
rjek
Please tell me who you work for, so I know to avoid any of your products.
Using BBC Basic like this terrifies me. If anything, because its total lack of
type safety for anything but the simplest of values.

~~~
meaty
Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety.

I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in
ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms.

Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That
particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints.

Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are
implicit so you need to know what it's going to do:

    
    
       REM win
       p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr%
    
       REM fail
       p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr%
    

The earlier has no cast, the latter does.

When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut:

<http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg>

~~~
saw-lau
Wow! Thanks for the reminder about how great NTK was. :-)

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gpvos
Looks like I need to get myself a proper (no-scrollwheel) three-button mouse
again. :)

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cturner
What would it take to get Sibelius running on this? Is it possible to get
binaries of this still?

~~~
meaty
That would require some serious work I imagine. Sibelius was 26-bit ARM (the
status register was mixed with the program counter if I remember). It would
require some extensive rework to do anything useful on later fully 32-bit
addressed ARM processors.

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Zolomon
I wonder what this means for the demo scene - I bet some awesome demos can
come out from this.

~~~
meaty
I don't know why anyone downvoted this. Some of the demos on the old
archimedes platform were awesome.

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89a
RISC OS was so awesome.

Windows looked like a dinosaur compared to this at the time

~~~
mavhc
It's still a dinosaur in functional gui features. Separation of document
window and app. Resize, move, scroll, click and type in windows without
bringing them to the front of the stack. A send to back of stack button. Drag
and drop load and save. Menus you can select and item and keep the menu open.

~~~
rahoulb
> Drag and drop load and save

This.

Open/Save dialogues simply aren't necessary with a proper desktop metaphor.
Shame no-one uses them any more.

