Re: A85: Shells and games

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Re: A85: Shells and games

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote:
> 
> I do not want to get into any wars over which shells are better..
> However, your comment above about ALL competent programmers believing
> Usgard to be the best shell is not correct!  A _TRUELY_ competent
> programmer can program well for _ANY_ environment, and I've known MANY
> who prefer environments with the LEAST extra features!!

Well, yes, but some things just CAN'T be done in ZShell, at least not
in a good way: TSR programs becomes very inconveniant, VAR_DELETE and
VAR_RESIZE becomes more or less impossible etc

> For what MY opinion is worth to anybody out there, OS/7 is the best
> shell made, because it happens to be the SMALLEST, and contains the
> LEAST junk!!  Also, who something is programmed by means NOTHING, as
> being a good programmer doesn't mean you can't STILL program junk (note:
> not meant to offend anyone.. just the truth!)

It would probably not be too hard to write a zshell compatible zshell
which is only 200 bytes or something, if you skipped the selection menu
(the user would have to type the name of the program in TI-OS). And if
the shell also used an external program to make it work for different
ROM versions, it would be even smaller. I wouldn't say that such a shell
would be the best shell.

You also have to take in account that Usgard (and phatos) programs
becomes
smaller. If the same programs were made for both ZShell and usgard for
example,
you would be able to put more usgard programs on the calculator because
even
if usgard is 600 bytes bigger than a zshell compatible shell, those 600
bytes
are saved because of relocation. My point is that just because a shell
is small doesn't make it better.

Btw, what do you mean with "junk"? Junk is something that can be removed
without
any loss, but I don't see anything in Usgard that is unnecessary... the
usgard
team has carefully selected routines that are used by most programs to
include
in the shell.

-- 
Jimmy Mårdell                "The nice thing about standards is that 
mailto:mja@algonet.se         there are so many of them to choose from."
http://www.algonet.se/~mja    
IRC: Yarin                   "Sanity? I'm sure I have it on tape
somewhere!"
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