SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives
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August |
2003 ]
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In perhaps not the smartest move in my life I've set up to do
two presentations this Saturday, one relative to our scheduled
introduction to writing OS/2 device drivers in assembly (IBM's
ALP or Watcom's wasm) and C as part of the programming
SIG, and the other on an introduction to PL/I as the main
presentation. With only two days left for preparation and
some parts of my other lives in competition for my time I am,
to say the least, a bit worried and hurried.
I mean we went for three monthly meetings getting
shortchanged on available time for the SIG meeting by the
main presentation. That curtailed somewhat the amount of
progress we could achieve in the shortened time. This
month, however, we seemed to have run short on presenters
for the main meeting, leaving only the SIG meeting on the
agenda.
Not feeling that many outside our regular SIG group would do
much more than roll their eyeballs, eat donuts, drink coffee,
and have little interest in writing device drivers I felt I should
offer an alternative. I offered to present an introduction to
PL/I, feeling that would maintain the same level of activity
relative to eyeballs, donuts, and coffee and possibly
somewhat more interest than device drivers. When your
choices get down to me and me that's when you really start
to miss Peter Skye with his penchant for lively prodding.
Carla seemingly has agreed on this agenda to post it to the
website. It would seem that Tony Butka will be off on his
honeymoon, Peter is still bailing relatives on his own in San
Diego, Dave Watson will be away, and neither Carla nor
Randell will be in attendance. Except for the coffee and
donuts the remainder will consist of us leftovers.
While I accept Steven Levine's assurance that ALP and WASM
represent no problem and have executed both successfully, I
cannot say the same for the driver source code with which I
have been working. I downloaded the three driver projects:
SBLive, vdd, and warpdriver. Much to my surprise all the vdd
code has been withdrawn with some kind of "gotcha"
message announcing its departure. The other two, SBLive and
WarpDriver, are loaded for bear. There just seems to be
nothing of an introductory nature that doesn't assume you've
already done the pre-prep.
That led me to install the IBM Device Driver Source Kit version
1.1, the latest and last issued circa 1993. It's a 195MB
production covering essentially the universe (at that time sans
USB) of device drivers. It probably offers the most complete
set of manuals, i.e. documentation, available on the subject.
It's certainly more extensive and probably correct than
anything offered by Steve Mastrianni's "Writing OS/2 2.0
Device Drivers in C" or Raymond Westwater's "Writing OS/2
Device Drivers". I will have both of these available for your
perusal on Saturday just in case you want to scrounge the
used book markets.
The problem with the IBM CD and the two books is that they
expect you are using MASM. LEX and YACC may go
hand-in-hand, but I have some reluctance for YAA (Yet
Another Assembler) as MASM 5.1 comes with the kit (CD) but
6.0 for writing 32-bit drivers doesn't. So I set about
attempting to assemble the mouse driver source from the IBM
kit with ALP.
That's where you learn that ALP is no MASM. Error messages
out the kazoo. Fortunately I have the OS/2 Toolkit 4.5. It
contains ALP compatible .inc files. I even got some more
experience with GUIFFY doing a folder compare and copying
the changed folders from the toolkit to the ddk.
Unfortunately the ddk contains source files not in the toolkit.
Thus it remains for me to determine the necessary
modifications to the source code as well as understand errors
which on examination appear to be false.
The whole point is that I've ground to a halt in terms of
preparation on this subject while yet in need to set aside
some time for prep on another. I have this feeling over the
next two days that I can do justice to both.
In the meantime I come across this message in the IBMFORUM
on CompuServe that full function (Enterprise Edition)
SmallTalk is available to download for free from the IBM
website. SmallTalk is the granddaddy language of
object-oriented programming. Here is the complete VisualAge
SmallTalk package with IDE and comprehensive
documentation.
Now this is a trial version with a non-terminating trial period
free for non-commercial use only. I'm thinking if we could get
IBM to follow the same logic (don't laugh) for APL and PL/I as
discontinued OS/2, we could combine these with the open
source versions of C/C++ (GCC and Watcom), MAUDE, and
Python, with ALP, the toolkit, and the ddk. Maybe we could
talk IBM into a non-commercial use form of VACPP.
It appears to me that we could offer and maintain a
Programming SIG CD with as complete a set of supporting
products and source to complement our website services,
once Sheridan decides to make his move on this. I would feel
a lot better at exploring algorithms in different languages if I
knew that all interested participants had equal access to the
supporting products for the programming languages.
Anyway it's just a thought to end this period of talking when
it could have been spent in doing. We might want to discuss
this as well on Saturday.
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Return to [ 13 |
August |
2003 ]
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