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Just to be ornery. 
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
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Wordle 1,198 3/6*
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I recall a conversation I had, over lunch, with our last summer IT intern. He was helping with some web development.
As he said he was heading into his last year of a computer science degree, I asked him if he took any compiler design courses.
He said, "What do you mean, compiler?"
Turns out, I had to explain to him what a compiler does.
This makes me cry for the future of IT and development.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Don't cry Richard, Chat GPT will save us all...
The best part of this is that old chaps will keep having good and well-paid jobs.
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As long as he didn't pretend to be an expert and was willing to learn, that's cool. Nobody knows everything and personality and willingness to learn says a lot. Learn him up and show him the way. Society and college has failed us, but we also failed the kids by being lazy parents (as a whole) and letting them rot in front of computers and TV their whole life. We were right there beside the kids rotting our minds too.
Which means, if it's going to get better in our lifetimes then it's up to us to fix it. Because by the time our generation is gone it'll be too late and humanity's down cycle will last much longer before we come out of it (we will, life is cyclical). So as long as he's not pompous and recognizes the things he doesn't know... there's hope. Guide the young padawan. If it's coming from a place of love, you'll make an impact on his life.
If he's one of them kids that thinks he knows everything because he learned one or two things that's a different story. But to be fair, I've seen that level of arrogance on CP with old farts. So arrogant ignorance isn't exactly exclusive to the younger generation.
Jeremy Falcon
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So if you asked about the Dragon book he'd have assumed you meant Game of Thrones or similar! 
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I am rather proud to have read the Dragon book a rather terse tome a tough read at least up to the chapter re/ emitting code and to have performed all the exercises therein which is the only way I am confident of learning as I learned enough to implement an expression parser utilizing the work of Alan Holub. Only later did I learn I should have emitted code as running the parser w/o same was rather slow.
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Perhaps if you had used the pseudo-synonymous word for 'compiler', i.e., 'interpreter', is there a likelihood of having elicited a positive response?
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So, I have a system I am pitching to migrate to something modern. It was written in the early 80s using a VT terminal interface to a VAX. The customer has attempted to redevelop, migrate, re do this system about a 1/2 dozen times, all ending in failure. What keeps getting miss is that, at the end of the day, the system works. Production knows how to rapidly enter jobs to produce the product.
So, picture a UI that is a series of terminal input. I guess the closest analogy would be entering prompts at the command prompt level. I really don't want to continue in this direction, but the UI is key to the effectiveness of the system. Unlike Microsoft, I abhor screwing with users. It's important that phase 1 of the new project look and behave exactly like the existing system. Any suggestions for libraries or toolkits. I don't care if I have to buy a license.
The UI is the most evident thing about this application. There are users that are simply wizards at flying through the terminal based interface. I also have to migrate from flat files to an RDB and replace all of the report code with a modern report writer but that's another issue.
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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Terminal could mean a lot of things... there are UI libraries out there that simulate a UI in a terminal. Windows 1 did it. Ncurses does it.
So when you say terminal, are you talking about something like this? Or is it something like this?
In either case, the good news is you don't need any fancy UI library. If they're that resistant to change then less is more and I can't imagine any UI lib that wouldn't have the basic inputs to mimic those two screenshots.
Jeremy Falcon
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It's not that gross, but I'll post some screen captures shortly. I know piebold will understand when I say this is all VT100 based. Works fine in putty.
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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You might find it worthwhile to read William Galitz, "Handbook of Screen Form Design". It's from that era, but his philosophy should translate to a world of text boxes, radio buttons, etc etc.
When we used his ideas back in the dark ages, it seemed to reduce "forehead meets keyboard" events among the users.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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It might not be a good idea to "upgrade" at all.
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This might in fact be true. We're now on the 3rd generation of developers/support people. I don't think it's going to 4.
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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Okay, some images. Basically the users whip through the menu processing and thundering into data entry. UI presentation 1 is I want to mimic this behavior.
https://ibb.co/FXCWY2m
https://ibb.co/rtTVt5S
https://ibb.co/rtTVt5S
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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Well, if they're used to using a thin client / mainframe like that over SSH and you don't want to lose that concept of thin client and/or the app is on the way out anyway, you really only have three options (ignoring MS's butchering of the term smart client in WPF, etc.).
1 Check out Ncurses. It's a 100% terminal based UI library and totally free. It's a C library but I'm sure you can find bindings for it just about any language. You can spice it up a little and lose zero of the thin client goodness and everything is 100% terminal based.
2 You can replace that old UI as a web page pretty easy, and you can make it look exactly the same. It's still considered thin client / mainframe as only the browser is required. There are tons of examples out there that mimic a console for the web.
3 As mentioned, if the app is going to die anyway... then just do nothing and let it die.
Jeremy Falcon
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But I want the money  .
I've had to deal with requests over the last 20 years that are simply not possible with the current system. They keep trying to replace it without talking to the people that use it and know it.
I'm just looking for something that will allow me to replicate the speed of the terminal environment. I'll check into the links.
Charlie Gilley
“Microsoft is the virus..."
"the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"
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My article :: CommScript[^] :: is how I dealt with automating data entry via such a system about twenty years ago.
I doubt that will you in your endeavor.
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I am not certain I fully understand your intention but permit me to say I am looking forward to learning the GUI library "Dear ImGui" as it is impressively fast and am rather fond of it's appearance.
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First of all, you need to learn the communication protocol between the VT terminal and VAX. And of course, learn the relevant parts of the terminal protocol. Only when you understand completely, how they talk between them, you can start your application design.
Since terminals from these old days where dumb devices, I suspect that this communication protocol is heavily based on the VT terminal features (only my guess). So, VAX knows exactly, which terminal it is talking with, and sends terminal-specific data to it.
Learning the VT terminal reference is another necessary step.
So, your task is to write VT terminal emulation. VAX should believe that it is talking with VT. End user may see an exact copy of the terminal or something else, like full-featured GUI application - this is less important. Finally, such tasks are usually solved by complete terminal emulation also for end user. Not surprising, this is a lot of work.
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I fixed a bunch of bugs in terms of color byte order (I had switched from RGBA to ABGR) which I hoped would fix my SVG rendering, whose colors are off. After finding and squashing a bunch of bugs (and watching the colors change accordingly) the last bug I fixed put my output clear back where I started!
So that was my morning. 
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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Have a colorful day! 
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Why you switched from 'RGBA to ABGR'?
From what I remember, 'ABGR' is really a native Windows API thing, which has even corrected with wpf.
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It's not windows. (Well, it can be, but it's embedded/cross platform)
It's based on the fact that the plutosvg library I used uses argb and rgba but LITTLE ENDIAN overall.
The thing is, since shifts are reversed for big vs little endian in C/C++ big endian RGBA = little endian ABGR
My graphics library produces big endian footprints for pixels on little endian systems. The reason for that is almost all display hardware takes its frame buffer memory in big endian format.
I'd change plutovg to use big endian pixels but I don't understand this function:
static inline uint32_t BYTE_MUL(uint32_t x, uint32_t a)
{
uint32_t t = (x & 0xff00ff) * a;
t = (t + ((t >> 8) & 0xff00ff) + 0x800080) >> 8;
t &= 0xff00ff;
x = ((x >> 8) & 0xff00ff) * a;
x = (x + ((x >> 8) & 0xff00ff) + 0x800080);
x &= 0xff00ff00;
x |= t;
return x;
}
The exception would be things like a windows PC, * but * in that case it's 1 byte per pixel, making swapping them easy, whereas byte swapping a 16-bit RGB565 pixel is less straightforward.
So since plutovg is RGBA little endian, my vector pixel format is ABGR big endian. In my library, conversions between different pixel formats is transparent so it really doesn't impact the surface area of the API.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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