Commodore Languages List (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Commodore Languages List (2021)

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57 pointsingve22 comments

I see the French Silk assembler made the list. I saw the ad for this thing in the back of The Transactor, I believe, and basically begged my parents to buy it for me. I was around eleven or twelve years old. I taught myself 6502 assembly, sort of (there was a lot of stuff I didn’t get). I made a simple drawing program, among other things. It was mind-expanding stuff, some of the happiest memories of my childhood.

COMAL is one of these little computer tech gems that just went overboard with currents of tech market history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL

The History section is a great read!

That and Simon's Basic were my earliest programming experiences.

I found it in the students library and I had a C64 at the time and I thought "Wow, this is it! This is the official, real language for the Commodore, 'cos COMmodore and COMal, obvious, right?"

Back in the late 80s, we had a bunch of C128s running COMAL in the computer lab in school. I was quite proficient in BASIC back then and found COMAL's structuredness somewhat narrow minded and stuffy. But then I didn't know any better, and I fortunately learned to appreciate better structured programming languages soon.

COMAL was my first programming language (unless you count HP 11C code), it was really great. Does anyone know where to get the Windows version?

Reading these made me wonder: what was the best self-hosted language on the C64 (or Apple II or other early computers)?

Like if those computers had existed in a world like today with open source and easy communication, what could the development environment have looked like?

I had an Apple II as a kid and knowledge and tools were so _scarce_ ... there was a certain magic to the secret world of the computers, but mostly I was cut off by a lack of access. And I'm sure some of the languages in this list were denied the audience they deserved by that same lack of access. (COMAL for instance looks like it would have been a breath of fresh air for my younger self)

I'd vote for a version of Forth. Forth has fallen out of favor these days because it works best when you don't really have an operating system as such and so the Forth system can become the OS. And because it's arguably not that maintainable with large systems, I suppose. But on 8-bit systems running at low clock speeds like in the 1980s it was ideal. It ran quickly and used little memory. And unlike other development systems of the day there were freely available Forth systems that were public domain software and you could legally obtain them from a friend or from companies that could sell you copies for the price of the disks themselves. On the Apple II, my favorite Forth was Mad Apple Forth created in Madison, WI and which used to have a user group for it there.

For the cbm64 i'd argue the best language was assembly. Nothing else really came close. And considering we were fairly well connected via BBS communication was decent. Not a good as today, but pretty good.

Note the selection of compilers for languages that many would say only exist as interpreters, on a system using a couple of KB.

Hey, I got a credit!

Diabolo is one of the more interesting BASIC compilers. It really does issue exceptionally fast code compared to others if you can make it work with the constrained subset it supports. It's about two or three times slower than handwritten assembly code, which considering it has barely token optimization passes (not really a thing on home computers in the 1980s) is notable.

PROMAL is probably the most under-rated language on this list. It's like C but with Python syntax. Includes a command shell, editor, compiler, etc. Can compile to run in the shell or as a stand-alone binary.

Sample code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROMAL

Download: http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/PROMAL/

White Lightning Forth was amazing. I started coding a game using it (side scroller/platformer). Never released because I’m a TERRIBLE artist, so it was never finished. But WL definitely deserved the “lightning” moniker.

http://www.jimbrooks.org/archive/programming/forth/WhiteLigh...

Nothing for the Commodore Amiga, eh? No AMOS or ARexx :(

This list was targeted at the 8 but computers.

8-Bit Show And Tell on Youtube has a nice presentation on FORTH, worth watching for those unfamiliar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XdgUK1NbpI

Weird. Bluecoat tags the page as phishing site, yet there is not even a script-tag...

So all Ada had... an Ada Training Course... :(

Missing: the PET implementations of LOGO.

If you have any reference, maybe fire off an email to him.

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