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Admin
VM host software with no snapshot capability?
Admin
What is this language/ platform? Anybody?
Admin
So much time wasted in the last 10 or 15 years spent on installing the IDE and getting it to run could have resulted in a port to something else. ANYTHING else.
Admin
By the description, looks like Borland C++ Builder (due to the Pascal supporting library)
Admin
Neither of those files is called "main.cpp".
Admin
You do what you must. Circa 2019 I re-wrote a project written way back in the mid 80s where VB let you name variables with a letter or a letter followed by a number and everything had a line number. Somewhere along the line, they updated but just to try to run the program I needed a DOS emulator. I had great sympathy for the engineers forced to use that dinosaur. Now I work with very modern ... um... oh, yeah. We use ForTran.
Admin
I believe they are talking about 4 separate files: main.cpp, a second main.cpp, Station.cpp, and Station1.cpp.
Admin
I have worked at multiple companies that got stuck on Visual Studio 6 for way too long. I managed to drag some of them into the modern era. It's very frustrating when people refuse to move forward. I also worked at one small company that used C++Builder. I was able to upgrade them to a newer version of that as they had stuck with one of the earliest releases.
The mention of Pascal makes me wonder if this is place was using a Borland product. Does anybody know if Borland C++'s OWL implementation was Pascal based? I seem to recall Borland using some of their Delphi tech in C++. But it's been a long time since I looked at any of that, 30 years now I guess.
Admin
Haha, every time some youngster dev comes around it claims XML is overly complicated, I mention CORBA.
Admin
I miss the old good days of Borland C++ Builder, which was basically a work-around to use Delphi with C++
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One of the things that MAKE legacy code legacy. Very common mistake to say MAKES. First sentence. (Other mistakes and half-spaced hyphen-dashes galore made me just give up on trying to read the article for my own sanity.)
Admin
True . . . but I interpreted her statement as "there are two folders --- each with a file named main.cpp --- in addition to two other files --- named Station.cpp and Station1.cpp --- which also have a main() function."
Admin
VB didn't exist (yet) in the mid 80s (first release 1991). And BASIC on PCs always let you use more than just letter or letter+digit. At least letter+letter was also possible, but in fact the limit was up to 39 letters and/or digits after the initial letter, in both BASICA and GWBASIC.
Admin
Here's a situation that clearly calls for ChatGPT to handle the codebase
Admin
Good luck, you are ain't getting far when cloudflare is falling over itself like today :-)
Admin
Wasn't there some limitations when it came to significant characters?
I vaguely remember that for GWBASIC only the first 16 characters were actually significant. So A234567890123456A and A234567890123456B were the same. But maybe I'm mixing that up with another BASIC dialect like Q-BASIC.
Admin
Argle may be going back even further. I never had the, uh, pleasure(?) of working with VB in its early days. But in the early 70s, before there was a VB, I worked in BASIC-PLUS on a couple different PDP-11 machines. (I seem to remember that we called it Dartmouth BASIC-PLUS, thus conflating two different versions.) Argle's variable rules applied there. I don't remember the introduction of "extend mode," which allowed longer variable names, but my memories of over half a century ago are, thankfully, blurry. Then again, my memories of last week are pretty blurry, too.
Admin
Admin
So … not Visual Basic, then. First released in 1991, it never required line numbers, and IIRC, even version 1.0 supported variables with longer names. You’re probably thinking of a much older BASIC dialect, many of which had the features you describe. Even MS GW-BASIC (from 1983) had long variable names, but a lot of 1980s BASICs didn’t.
Admin
Borland C++ Builder had Delphi-like UI builder and Form code file (TForm? CForm? no, CForm is MFC) and they used VCL (visua controls libraries) C++ dialect was unique
Admin
"A nostalgic, perhaps masochistic part of me will miss the old stack and its daily delights." I think the word you're looking for here is "institutionalised"
Admin
People are saying C++ Builder, but it has had regular updates this whole time with the latest release coming out 2 months ago.
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Is the IDE one of the Borland ones?
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Well, you are in luck because Delphi + GC basically became .net :-)
Admin
Can agree that working for a great company can out-weight a lot of IDE/dev system insanity. Besides, keeping something that old and crufty alive and usable can be kind of fun.
Admin
Let us be thankful we have VBRUN600.DLL. Use it more. Use it more now. Use it. And be happy.
Admin
A surprising number of people are still using VC++ 6.0 because, like the B52, it's better at what it does than any of its successors.
Admin
Yeah, this is actually one case where AI can be really useful... transforming an older codebase into something more modern. I mean, it still needs careful supervision, but that beats rewriting half a million lines of code by hand.
Admin
I thought of that one too, but it's still maintained today (not by Borland, though)
Admin
Indeed, OWL was before that, I think it was Turbo C++
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A number of early BASIC interpreters would happily let you use many (sometimes up to 8!) characters in a variable name, but only the first 2 were significant. And not having to use line numbers? Angels sang on that day.
Admin
I had the privilege of converting an existing accounting and inventory control package from Basic-4's Basic to run on the then-new HP-3000 and what they called Basic-3000. This was roughly 1975. Variable names were limited to the then-typical letter or letter-number. Plus a $ if a string, or no $ if numeric. And of course all variables were global.
Good gawd was that a workout for a dev's personal memory banks. Fortunately I was young and dumb and didn't know any better.
Admin
Still super simple compare to assembler back in those days. Labels were a luxury, you had to remember the the hex addresses. Which was even more tricky in practice, because it was a stack based architecture, so no registers.
Admin
I was wrong to say that the IDE was discontinued in 2002. (Perhaps that was wishful thinking.) Borland kept it alive until they were bought out in 2007, and indeed some version of this software is still maintained from a corporate buyout of a corporate buyout.
I... think that makes it worse. If my predecessors theoretically had access to a version of C++ Builder - such as it was - contemporary to the start of the product, then why oh why did they use a version some 15 years out-of-date? Deep down I think I know the answer - the original developer had "a tool", had no interest in updating (or, indeed, paid-relicensing) that tool, and used it with an awful and familiar efficiency. Like a serial killer with a favourite axe.
Admin
Hey. You know as well as I do that they just don't make these things the way they used to. Sure, I had to replace the handle and blade both several times each since the 70's. But that's just maintenance. I'd take this old girl over a modern made in china neck trimmer any day.
Admin
So, not a fan of artificial keys, and couldn't really type. Typical dev of the period.
Admin
I kept an old VB app alive for a long time, running in the cloud, of all things, in Wine. The user accessed it via X11, while I was creating an entirely new implementation. This way I could create a webservice in java, also running in Wine, using jdbc-odbc-bridge, so that both the old and new application could access the same ms access database and do concurrent updates in the development phase. When the new app was ready I moved the database to Postgres.
Admin
I kept an old VB app alive for a long time, running in the cloud, of all things, in Wine. The user accessed it via X11, while I was creating an entirely new implementation. This way I could create a webservice in java, also running in Wine, using jdbc-odbc-bridge, so that both the old and new application could access the same ms access database and do concurrent updates in the development phase. When the new app was ready I moved the database to Postgres.