Good question. I have no idea how difficult that would be. It would depend on how well-factored the disk access routines are from the other OS routines. You *can* reserve part of a Profile hard disk as a Pascal volume using a tool that comes with Apple Pasca, but I don't know if that's a file on a ProDOS volum, or how it works.

The MS-DOS p-system did apparently interoperable with the FAT filesystem, so it's possibly do-able?

Yeah, it would have to be an ARM-based Arduino, to use the Rust version. But there are several of those now, and they're not even necessarily more-expensive than the AVR versions.

Why in the world would you want a new interpreter for the Apple II? The one that exists is fine. And yes - people *have* done this before, mostly rather a long time ago. Building another version of the same thing isn't a bad thing, especially if it comes along with better documentation of the internals, in a way that's accessible to a modern audience.

Unsurprisingly, the 25-year-old project you refer to doesn't build on my system. And neither does the version Peter Miller updated way back in 2010. It's probably worth revisiting projects like this every decade or so.

Yes, with a caveat. Apple Pascal has some native 6502 routines as extensions to the standard UCSD Pascal. These will have to be translated, ideally to p-Code, and wired into something in the emulator. But I'd *like to* do that, once I have things up and running.

It's really a shame that there weren't some existing media in which short stories were popular --- they could have been made available on the Kindle in some periodic fashion, grouped by topic/subject, and to which folks could have subscribed....

Folks have been trying to bring this to the table since computers were first rolled out.

The problem is, any sort of taxes/fees will impact corporate profits (or be inflationary) so are pretty much a non-starter in the current political climate.

We need a trust-busting President who can get a political ground-swell of support who actually has a moral backbone, not a pot-smoking or bar-tending woman-chasing draft-dodger.

"Maker" == geek who missed shop class.

Which is why DEK named his programming system Literate Programming:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fbook...

I really wish this was more prevalent, and better supported --- that said:

http://www.literateprogramming...

makes for interesting reading and has some really cool texts such as:

http://www.literateprogramming...

Not just this, but the OS vendors cripple them as well --- I've had to roll back to 1703 on my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 running Windows 10 twice now --- I simply can't use the machine w/ the digital stylus reduced to an 11th touch input as Fall Creators Update implements.

I've long preferred pen computers (started w/ PenPoint on an NCR-3125) and enjoyed a steady stream of improvements (w/ a few dead ends such as Apple's Newton and PalmOS)) but for some reason, Microsoft made it impossible to select text, choosing instead to have the stylus scroll --- which was easily done w/ a fingertip when holding a stylus.

If Apple doesn't get the Apple Pencil to a usable level on a tablet Mac in the near future, I despair of what machine I'll buy running what OS.

Having to use a keyword to introduce a new symbol is a pretty critical reliability feature. If there's no keyword to say "I want to define a variable", then every typo creates a new variable, rather than a compiler error. Lots of scripting languages work this way, and it's hell on reliability.

They're not. That's why you have "var" and "let" keywords. You use "let" for constants, and "var" for mutable objects.

"Systems programming" != "device driver development". Nothing above the driver level should be accessing hardware directly, so that's a feature that could likely wait until every other Swift use-case has been addressed.

Not sure what the actual complaint is here. Can you give an example of something that's particularly difficult?

Part of the goal of Swift is to use compiler "smarts" to generate performant code. You can't really do much in the way of optimizations for dynamic dispatch, so it's not the preferred method. The bindings are there to talk to Objective-C, but Swift-native code is expected to solve those problems another way.

As far as I know, it's purely aesthetic. It's worth noting that type declarations are optional fairly often in Swift, so perhaps it was a decision to try to make the appearance of types less "jarring" where they *do* need to show up.

It would be really nice if someone would do something meaningful w/ all the code for PenPoint --- it was one of my favourite operating systems, and amazingly capable for its time, and interface-wise, is still nicer than pretty much anything other than the Newton OS, or NeXTstep (or maybe HP's NewWave).

For those who don't remember it: http://www.digibarn.com/collec...

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.