By the way, the Wirecutter speaks highly of Acer Chromebooks, saying they are the best budget models.

I am also writing this post using Xubuntu Xfce. This is thanks to the program Crouton from Google. It lets you run Linux as a tab in the Chrome browser, so you can easily drop from ordinary Chrome mode into Linux, and back! It is a brilliant use of Linux’s “chroot” capability.

I find this magical. If not magical, it’s certainly cheap.

I do all my coding on Linux and publish it via Github, so I don’t need much local storage.

A couple of years ago I paid about $1300 for a Google Chromebook Pixel LS (Ludicrous Speed). I just sold it for about a $1000 on ebay. I think I got more than I expected because Google recently announced they won’t be making any more Chromebooks with the word Google in the name. (I think this to protect the brand association of Chrome with Google’s phones.)

What I definitely find magical is that when I got the Pixel LS, I got three years free use of 1 terabyte of storage for Google Drive. I took advantage of this by uploading ALL of Mozart’s music from a set of 120 CD’s I got a few years back.

I use the Clementine music player on Linux. I just opened it up, and noticed that I can connect to my Mozart music on Google Drive.

Open Source is wonderful. It provides a way for we programmers to take care of each other, from operating system kernels to compilers to browser tabs to Mozart.

And all for free.

Enjoy!

Finally, I am thinking of attempting to port your Spitbol implementation so that it can be run on a Raspberry Pi 3. I assume there would be significant effort required. I would like your thoughts on this?

After resonding to Craig, I realized others might be interested, so here is what I said.

Craig,

Thanks for the man page! I just checked it into spitbol/x32 and spitbol/x64

Re OSX, the latest is at github/spitbol/x64.

I’ll look at the problem with underline you mentioned.

Re port to PI 3.

Native port would be a lot of work.

Quick workaround would be use to use a DOS emulator to run the Windows version (spitbol/windows-nt) on the PI. A quick search for ‘run dos on PI ‘ turned up, for example

https://devtidbits.com/2013/04/23/run-dos-on-the-raspberry-pi-use-rpix86-to-turn-your-pi-into-a-1980s-super-computer/#dosonthepi

By the way, the Windows version is the same as the Unix version, except its only 32-bit, while we have 32 and 54 bit versions for x86-64. It also has some other features such as graphics support, ability to load assembly language functions, ability to load modules, that have yet to be ported to any other version.
Only problem is that it has upper case as the default, while Unix version uses lower case as the default.

I think the next step would be to port gobol to the PI and complete the port.

Gobol, github.com/daveshields/gobol, is a prototype with a MINIMAL interpreter written in Go.

The next step would be to flesh out the OSINT (OS interface) part of SPITBOL with one written in Go.

The current one is written in C. It was great stuff when it was put together in the 80’s, but I now find it a bit crufty, since it shows the wear and tear of having been adapted so it can be compiled on five or so different architectures (ancient MAC, Solaris, MIPS, Windows, …)

Once we have an OSINT written in GO, we would have a great teaching tool. By the way, the Go OSINT needn’t have all the capabilities of the C version, at least not at the start. Not much is needed to get simple file i/o, time, date, and such up and running.

SPITBOL for teaching is to me the main point. If people want performance they can always use the Windows or UNIX (Linux, OSX) versions.

Given OSINT in Go, then could then attempt translator to direct ARM code, getting rid of the Minimal interpreter written in go.

Note that the version with interpreter and OSINT both in Go could be ported anywhere Go runs, and that seems to be almost everywhere these days.

Thanks again for you interest in, and help on, SPITBOL

dave

Thanks Craig!

Fribble won one by a score of 428 to 381, the other by one point, 477 to 476.

That FRIBBLE was able to score more than 400 points in each game is also good news.

Can you tell which moves were made by Fribble, and which were not?

FRIBBLE is written in SPITBOL, and uses a brute-force approach, trying all possible moves, to play WWWF.

Fribble can be run in three ways: to play against itself, to play against you, or to help you play a game with a foe, with Fribble finding your moves.

The code speaks for itself. Speaking for my self, I can say that I have never had more fun writing a program than I have had writing FRIBBLE.

FRIBBLE is also my first program inspired by an election.

I was an obsessive follower of the recent presidential election, spending more time than I care to admit on Twitter, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, and so on.

After the election, looking for a more productive and entertaining form of amusement, I started playing Words With Friends, an online version of Scrabble. My foe was a fellow IBMer and friend who said he was quite good at WWF.

Indeed he is. We have played many games and I have yet to beat him. Often his score is 50% higher than mine.

Soon after I realized I was unlikely to ever win a game against him, I though of using my programming skills to see if I would write a program that could play WWF.

Fribble, representing just over two months of the most fun I have yet had writing a program, is the realization of that goal.

What has made the writing of Fribble such fun is the realization that it is as close to an ideal demonstration of SPITBOL as I have yet seen. Everyone knows about games such as Scrabble and WWF, and dealing with strings, words, lines of text, dictionaries, and all that such games involve, is the perfect grist for SPITBOL’s mill.

Though the program is largely done, I plan to continue work on it by using it as a way to teach SPITBOL as a first, or at least early, programming language.

Dave

It makes reference to an article about SPITBOL that appeared on Hacker News a couple of weeks ago: Hacker News.

SPITBOL 88 Binary Distribution, executable binaries, along with documentation,  test and demonstration programs,

SPITBOL 88 Source Distribution, executable binaries, along with documentation,  test and demonstration programs, This version also includes all source files needed to build the system.

This is a “micro” version of SPITBOL-386 with all its functionality but with a much reduced memory capability.

It generates EXE files and is useful in situations where you wish to distribute a program that is capable of running on all MS-DOS platforms, from 8088 through Pentium.

The files were supplied by Mark Emmer, proprietor of Catspaw, Inc, in the form of the file SPIT88.ZIP, with file dates from the early 1990’s.

The program source for this version of SPITBOL is not available. Only executables are provided to compile and execute SPITBOL programs.

Demonstration and sample programs are included, licensed using a two-clause BSD license.

SPITBOL now supports the use of the gas (GNU as) assembler to translate the MINIMAL source code. This is now the default translator used for Unix and OSX.

Executable binaries:

./bin/sbl_osx OSX SPITBOL (64 bits)

./bin/sbl_unix Unix version (64 bits)

./bin/sbl_unix_32 Unix version (32 bits)

Documentation:

./docs/green-book.pdf The SNOBOL4 Programming Language, Griswold, et. al.

./docs/spitbol-manual.pdf SPITBOL User Manual, Emmer and Quillen

./demos demonstration programs from the SPITBOL User Manual

SPITBOL is licensed under the GPL (v2 or later) license. All code needed to build the system is included in this repository.

To build spitbol (./sbl):

OSX:

make osx

make test_osx
Unix:

make unix

make test_unix
See readme.txt for instructions on interpreting the test output.

At Robert’s suggestion, I spent two weeks in March 1976 in Leeds, England, where Tony was a professor at the University of Leeds, to learn more about Macro SPITBOL, mainly to see if we could apply some its technology to help in porting SETL to new machines. I was accompanied by my wife Karin and daughter Alison.

Tony and his wife Olga were wonderful hosts.

Working with Tony was a memorable experience. He was a very modest and soft-spoken gentleman.

As long as I can remember, the default extension for SPITBOL source files has been “spt,” pronounced, as one might guess, as “spit.”

Tony preferred the extension “sbl”, pronounced like the name “sibyl.” (I just looked up the meaning of ‘sybil’ and learned that it means “a woman in ancient times supposed to utter the oracles and prophecies of a god.”

Soon after I started working on SPITBOL in 2009, I was able to track down Tony’s email address, and received the following letter in reply in May, 2009:

Hi dave,

I am still living where I was when you visited Leeds all those years ago, when SPITBOL was still a new and needy product! However Olga my wife died from a heart attack 6 weeks ago so I am planning to sell and move next summer to the nearby village of Menston where two of my daughters and their families live.

I have been retired for 7 or 8 years from the software company with which I worked after leaving Leeds University in 1988 – I wanted to program for the last part of my working career rather than be a senior departmental administrator and it all turned out very well.

I hope you are well and presume that you may have reached retirement or thereabouts.

All the best
Tony

I learned not long after from Tony’s son that Tony had passed away.

He was a wonderful man, just wonderful.

I have just extended SPITBOL so that the suffix ‘sbl’ can also be used for SPITBOL source files.

From now on, whenever I run an existing SPITBOL program, or write a new one with the suffix “sbl,” I hope that will remind me of Tony.

If you have read this post, I hope you will be so reminded.

Anthony P. “Tony” McCann: May his Memory be a Blessing.”