[TowerTalk] DOS?

[jimlux]

On 10/13/16 7:57 AM, TexasRF--- via TowerTalk wrote:
> John, that is exactly the scenario here. All of the programs  tested work
> just fine on several Windows 32 bit o/s I have tried.
>
> I was hoping to find a workaround. The dos emulator I tried sort of worked
> in parts of the program but the added latency caused parts of the program
> to  fail.
>
> Poking around the Windows files, I see a folder called system32 that was
> recently created and has several dozen files in it. Makes me wonder if there
> is  the possibility of using a different set of files for 16/32 bit
> applications.  Probably a good way to disable a perfectly good computer!
>
> I am way overdue to improve my programming skill set to convert to real
> Windows type programs  but I can't seem to muster up the courage to get
> started yet.
>
> I need a pep talk!
>

I would suggest that rather than trying to keep up with the ever 
changing VB/VC++/VC#/.net world that you bite the bullet and learn 
python or ruby.

Both are a combination of compiled/interpreted, but usually used as the 
latter
Both have good interactive environments to do development and testing in
Both are easy to do a "hello world"

Python has an enormous number of specialized libraries available for 
numerical and signal processing stuff(scipy, numpy, matplotlib, etc.). 
Both have copious facility for doing string handling, formatting, binary 
file manipulation, etc.

There's a variety of GUI libraries for Python (QT, for instance), but 
like all GUI libraries, there's a learning curve - there's probably a 
nice "drag and drop" environment for this like there is for Visual-X, 
but I've not spent much time on it.



Python has good support on little microcontroller boards (Beaglebone, 
Raspberry Pi) and there are libraries to talk to external hardware - 
it's as simple as the Arduino "digitalWrite(pin#, value)"

Most important, they are basically OS/platform independent - I write 
code (mostly in Python) that runs on Windows (XP,7, 10), Mac OSX, and 
Linux without any changes other than the naming of things like serial 
ports ("COMx:" on Windows, /dev/ttyUSB0 on Linux, /dev/ttyxxx on Mac) 
(pyserial is your friend)

Python is a bit weird at first, because block structure is done with 
indenting, not curly braces or "begin/end" syntax.
Ruby is more traditional, block structure is "begin/end"

I've not done much hardware interfacing or numerical computation with 
Ruby so I don't know what is available - I use python for numerical 
stuff (moving away from Matlab/Octave)

I've used Ruby (recently) for more "scripting" applications because a 
tool we have at work requires it.  Normally, i've been doing  my 
scripting stuff in Python (moving away from Batch files/Powershell on 
Windows, and bash on Mac/Linux)



Ruby:
~ jimlux$ irb
irb(main):001:0> puts "hello world"
hello world
=> nil
irb(main):007:0> def abc(n)
irb(main):008:1>   for i in 0..n
irb(main):009:2>     puts i
irb(main):010:2>   end
irb(main):011:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):012:0> abc(3)
0
1
2
3
=> 0..3
irb(main):013:0> exit



Python:
~ jimlux$ python
 >>> print "hello world"
hello world
 >>> def abc(n):
...   for i in range(n):
...     print i
...
 >>> abc(3)
0
1
2
 >>> quit()
~ jimlux$