Pick up the nearest book. Turn to page 42, post the second sentence. "The castle, then, was a Norman importation into England."

We’ve been stuck with line numbers in RISC OS BBC Basic for a very long time.

Look. Guys. I mean. Come on now.

Morning

Now the actual military has to dress like it’s not the military cuz federal law enforcement agencies dress too much like the military

The chances of having to build Nvidia FP8 single-byte floating point arrays in RISC OS BBC Basic is very small but non-zero – so can be represented by a float, and getting the rounding of E4M3 floats right has taken me a day longer than it should have. Yes I’ve done E5M2 too, that’s quite different.

I can’t believe it’s only been 15 years… youtu.be/CSK1D3bZhRs?...

💯

I've run businesses since 2003, a large chunk of that time in games. I've worked with AAA, publishers, platforms, service providers and indies. Huge success and epic failures. No one knows what's going to work today, or in the future. Anyone claiming otherwise just hasn't been humbled ✨yet✨.

Gemini continues to impress me with its deep and accurate RISC OS knowledge. 🤭

@givvygavvygoo.bsky.social Is this a form of bot-defeating obfuscation requiring human error correction or Fat Finger Syndrome? I'll send you a new version of !RMA.

Every time I look at the BBC Basic interpreter code a bug jumps out at me. Yet another “BBC Master International Character Sets Didn’t Make It To Basic” bug: [there’s so many]

Thanks to @armbytes.bsky.social for reminding me of the RO2-era BBC Basic “LOCAL DATA” foul-up. I’d dealt with it in nemoBasic by allowing READ as a synonym for DATA after LOCAL/RESTORE, which avoids the ancient tokenisation problem (duplicated in editors like Zap of course). But I fixed it.

Micheal Martin

Those RISC OS users coping with the traumatic loss of 32b ARMs (after the traumatic loss of 26b ARMs) by pitching their hopes on 64b ARMs should raise their gaze slightly nearer the horizon. Things change like Hemingway said - gradually, then suddenly.

Discworld QOTD, from Snuff

A belated Happy New Year to my RISC OS friends. I’m delighted to announce that I’ve completed the nemoBasic feature I teased before Christmas. This new functionality is really exciting for many reasons, so I’ll show you before I describe it: [I’ve coloured some strings here to clarify]

You can have too many steering wheel buttons...

Ok, found that bit, but where's the rest of it?!

Hi! I'm a complacent disregard for weather reports plus the most dangerous mountain in Wales.

The movie "Metropolis" came out in 1927. It is considered the first serious SciFi movie. It takes place in a dystopian future where a few very rich people control everything while regular people are forced to live in a kind of underworld. The year in the movie? 2026. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdtZ...

Amazingly, BBC Basic never really had a limit on the number of dimensions an array can have. The 8bit Beeb could have had up to 126, though the line length limit restricted you to 116. Dimensions were 16b which was more than enough in less than 64KB...

Iain M Banks was right. In no time there'll be giant Minds roaming space with various sized retinues of human pets, getting into skirmishes with each other and consuming all the energy in the cosmos...

I don’t think dogs have the right temperament to be shopkeepers, they’d want to please the customer. Only a cat could insist on no credit; no trying the merchandise; indifference to flattery. 👨 Who’s a good boy? You are! You’re such a good boy! 🐱 It’s still £9.99. And we’re closing.

A lot of new nemoBasic syntax is about avoiding repetitive boilerplate. For example, you can tell it to ignore file handle zero by preceding the # <handle> with IF – e.g. PRINTIF#handle. As nemoBasic allows statements to span multiple lines, this is more involved than you’d think:

Nobody: “I wonder where the STRACC string buffer is in RISC OS BBC Basic?” BBC Basic:

Don't give them trinkets, give them their full compensation and throw Fujitsu in the sea.

I finally got around to fixing a bug in RISC OS Basic that is actually from BBC Micro Basic in 1982 – neither tokenises “FORx=1E1TO2E2” correctly! The reason is some there’s-only-16KB-so-that’ll-have-to-do code which was dutifully carried over to the actually-there’s-more-than-that-now ARM version.

All technology, forever...

This is perfect. The DOJ's embarrassing snafu with disappearing redactions was the fault of Elon Musk. Musk cancelled government subscriptions to Adobe programs that would have made the redactions permanent. What a pack of fools.

Excellent.

I'd have paid a negotiable amount of money for that in 1987. I remember lugging a Beeb plus Zenith CRT in a shoulder bag around South Wales' rail network whilst at my first engineering job. I left the M128 in the flat cos it wouldn't fit. I've been walking in large circles ever since.

Cat Clinging To Side Of Christmas Tree Admits That Was Extent Of Plan https://theonion.com/cat-clinging-to-side-of-christmas-tree-admits-that-was-1849899567/

A “big” update to RISC OS nemoBasic. ON ERROR is a class of declaration I was hoping to significantly expand before Christmas, but the special surprise I have is still defrosting with the turkey, but in anticipation of that mystery meat I have implemented this: Large ON ERROR blocks:

Experimenting with trying to recreate some classic demo effects on the BBC Micro, starting with plasma. The version I have in Mode 5 looks better, but was slide show speed so moved to Mode 7. Needs more optimization, and the plasma effect can be improved. Added some music too. 🔊

Very strong contender.

Quite a bit of floppy swapping...

A trio of nemoBasic updates I’ve added in December. Firstly a trivial one: Press any key! Being able to just GET without storing the result is surprisingly useful (and optimises something I’d already implemented – the statement form EVAL GET which evaluates its expression but ignores the result)

Inspired to go out for a leisurely drive... #WheelieYellow

My plans for Christmas? I want to push my body to the very brink of Gout and then at the last minute pull myself back

Damn you Sainsbury's, this is your fault. 🤤

Don't use UrbanVPN:

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

"I don't need this water, I'll pour it in the bin" - my brain, apparently. It's happening folks, I'm going senile.

Typographers and fontographers, are you brave enough?!

"70% of the world’s EVs were manufactured in China... roughly 80-85% of global solar photovoltaic manufacturing, and more than 75% of all global battery production. If we set AI aside for a moment and assume that these technologies represent the future, it is clear who is ahead."

This, but code.