[kerravon86]

I am the main author of PDOS. I am not claiming to "know better" (or even know what that means). And I don't recognize your description of "PCs ought" as an accurate description of my views. Or even understand what that means either. If you ask a specific question I'll try to give an answer, based on my current understanding, but note that all my beliefs are tentative.

[lproven]

My screen name here is my real name and the same name I used on the old Hercules list.

Your posts were the main reason I left that list, in fact.

I tried very hard to explain stuff to you, and offer what I hoped would be some useful guidance, information, history, code to read about, etc.

You dismissed it all, and everything that everyone else on the list offered or said.

I couldn't stand the constant negativity, and in the end, I left. If nothing else, as someone who's worked with Free Software and Open Source for this entire century so far and made it my career, your total misunderstanding of it and passionate unreasonable antipathy to it was extremely tiresome.

I am happy for you that you've got this far, and I wish you no ill. All possible luck with the project. I will not be getting involved with it again, though.

[kerravon86]

I dismissed "everything" that "everyone" said? What nonsense. Some people on the list made extremely valuable contributions. Some even provided extremely valuable code. Whatever this stuff was that I allegedly unreasonably dismissed, it apparently didn't stop getting PDOS working. Note that that was predominantly a mainframe list, and PDOS now works on real z/Arch hardware. And accesses 4 GiB of memory instead of being limited to 2 GiB. On real hardware. Despite being almost entirely S/370 code (generated by a slightly modified GCC 3.2.3).

[skissane]

> PDOS now works on real z/Arch hardware. And accesses 4 GiB of memory instead of being limited to 2 GiB. On real hardware

Where’d you get the real hardware to test it with?

[kerravon86]

A guy turned up to the PDOS discord and said he had a mainframe, then after some discussion he invited another guy with a mainframe to join. Neither had hard disks though, so I had to IPL from (emulated) tape. There are photos in the hercules-380 (not os380) group.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>I dismissed "everything" that "everyone" said? What nonsense.

You just proved their point.

[kerravon86]

Ah no, that doesn't constitute "proof" of the original statement. However, it does now introduce a burden on me to show one single example to prove that I have not (to date) dismissed everything that everyone said. Prior to this the burden was on the other person to demonstrate that I had dismissed everything everyone had said. And we can be generous and allow that there is an implied "during the period that I was a member of the group", as it is increasingly absurd that he "knows" what I did in a group that he isn't even a member of. Note that his statement is also an active rejection. So if someone said "Ok, I'm going to the beach" and I fail to reply at all, because I have no reason to dismiss that statement, that would also constitute a counter-example. It's quite normal to not make an effort to say "I agree/don't dispute" to every single sentence someone says. So if you give me a time period, I'll post a link to a message where there is no sign of me dismissing what they said.

[radiojasper]

> I dismissed "everything" that "everyone" said? What nonsense.

You just... dismissed everything they said again.

[kerravon86]

Dismissing one phrase/sentence from one person is a different concept to dismissing everything from everyone. And I have counter-examples of people providing value information. Only one counter-example is required to dismiss the original claim. Quite apart from the fact that it's his burden to prove.

[skissane]

I've interacted with kerravon86 in the past. I even contributed a little bit of the code in PDOS. After a while I lost interest in it though. One reason was that I'm used to developing software under macos/Linux using Make or whatever – even on Windows I tend to use Cygwin/MSYS2/etc – PDOS (at least when I was working on it) had a build system based on DOS/Windows batch files. kerravon might find that a pleasant developer experience, but the majority wouldn't.

I remember when I wanted to add a tiny bit of C99 compatibility to PDOS or PDPCLIB (I think it was just stdint.h and stdbool.h headers, or something like that) and (from memory) got the reply "no, C90 only". I mean it is his project, he can run it how he likes, but a strict insistence on C90-only doesn't really appeal to me (or I imagine most contemporary C programmers). I think part of his reason was wanting to support old pre-C99 compilers; but, while that might be a reason to avoid some of the more advanced C99 features (e.g. _Generic), there's nothing about stdint or stdbool which can't be done under C90. So that's another reason why I lost interest. kerravon, I feel like you've got some unusual views which you don't want to budge on. (To be fair, I do too, but less so on technical topics.) Which is fine, but maybe have a think about how other people will experience that?

I also subscribed to some of the Hercules lists, I think hercules-os380 too. I have read some of kerravon's posts. I remember some tendency to go off-topic, and start talking about religion (the Muʿtazilah branch of Islamic theology) and politics (NATO)–which some people can experience as off-putting. But, I'll be honest, a lot of the technical discussions there went over my head. I'd be interested in any examples of what you are talking about.

[kerravon86]

stdint is a fundamentally wrong thing to do. If people were doing int_least32_t or whatever, ok, maybe that fits in with the spirit of C. But not int32_t.

"long long" itself is a fundamental violation of the original language too. If you want some large value - 512 bits, 1024 bits, 1113 bits, whatever - that's what "long" is for.

I am writing in C, not Turtle Graphics. I'm happy for the entire PDOS suite to be rewritten in Pascal or any other language. But first I haven't even completed C90. And it is extremely difficult trying to get a C90-compliant compiler too. I still haven't determined whether I need to dumb down PDOS to the C90 subset that SubC provides.

There are now makefiles for the 2 executables that I previously only provided bat files for. The bat files themselves were trivial anyway and I would have converted them to shell script for you had you asked. In actual fact, those .bat files are already shell scripts as far as I know. You can rename .bat to .sh if you want.

And you don't need to use Windows/Linux anymore, PDOS is self-hosting, including the building of the tools.