Microsoft open sources GWBASIC

Richard Cini rich.cini at verizon.net
Fri May 22 20:52:10 CDT 2020


You know, reading about this made me dig out the info I had on the Character Oriented Windows ("COW") library. I was reading some of the docs and it occurred to me that it operated much like Windows (probably Windows 1), but what I couldn't find were any "sample" programs or tools to build a program based on the COW library. Does anyone have/know of a sample program that used the library? Was there an SDK for it or was it used only for Microsoft's products?

Just looking for something new/interesting to learn about. Thanks!

Rich

On 5/22/20, 11:35 AM, "cctalk on behalf of Chuck Guzis via cctalk" <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org on behalf of cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

    A quick look at the code indicates to me that the Intel translator
    CONV86 may well have done the translation in "strict" mode.   Of course,
    there were other translators, but some of the stuff rings a bell.
    
    For example, the 8080 instruction
    
    	INX	B
    
    gets translated to
    
    	SAHF
    	INC	BX
    	LAHF
    
    all done because the 8080 16-bit instruction does not affect the zero
    and carry flags, but the 8086 instruction INC, does.   So there's very
    likely a large amount (my experience was at least >30%) of cruft in the
    code.
    
    --Chuck
    
    




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