Language series ends with ZPL article

After more than three years collecting data and writing the articles which began with coverage of APL in July of 2008 the end of the promissed alphabet has been reached with the article in the November 2011 issue on the language: ZPL.

I remember seeing other articles in other  computer magazines referring to something similar, but do not recall any having done so.   However, this really is not so daunting a task as the article on XML mentions that there are a very large number of XML languages and that there  are enough so that such an alphabet of just XML articles could be accomplished.

Thankfully I will not be taking such a route.  I am approaching the age of 70 and have seen my typing skill diminish rapidly.  Words which I know how to construct wind up with letters amiss requiring back stepping to adjust.

You may find the article on the ZPL language by following this link:
http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201111/page17.html

While reviewing the text I noticed that coverage for Guile and Haskell was not given on this blog.  So another post will correct soon this.

Yorick Language is featured in October Issue

Well here is the entry for Y. And you may now know why the text of the material on the XML page was selected. For it is the text entry from the play Hamlet.

Now at last there only remains an article to cover a language which begins with Z and our English alphabet of Computer languages will be complete having made a selection of one language for each of the 26 letters.

It has been a long three years since I first made the entry for the language APL in the July 2008 issue. The promised article on the commercial version of this language was never published. However, I did make a movie showing how one would install the commercial version on their computer and that was posted on YouTube. To find it just search for videos by eronstuc.  Here you will also find videos of my little dog Liz and some showing old versions of my multi-booting computer systems.

The article for the Yorick language will be found at the following link:
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201110/page16.html

Until next month.

The September issue features XML

This is interesting none of my linux hard drives are now functional. The image was captured within a live session of the Full Monty KDE4 distro. I have found a replacement and will soon be purchasing a replacement drive. So I will be back to doing as I wrote in my very first article to appear in the Magazine. That was the Dec. 2007 which showed how to setup a multi-booting multi disk system.

Not only that but Windows failed to boot so I wound up using the recovery partition to restore my XP system. This did an analysis and reported that the 320 gig and the 60 gig drive failed due to an error 18 cache. Now the recovery yielded wound up with a system with no internet access.

At that time I could still boot into Knoppix 6.5 and from here I was able to download a windows version of Firefox. This was burned to a cd and then it was installed after booting into Windows. So I have a system which is free from Internet Explorer. What had been 87 gigs now has only 20 gigs so there is much free space. Almost all the languages downloaded to windows for exploring while writing this series are gone.

Now the coverage of the material on XML is found at the following link:
http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201109/page17.html

Articles from long past discovered

While looking through my old files I found an old copy of the Super Pet Gazette which I had saved. So this developed a desire to learn if by any chance there might be other issues of this to be found on the web.

When I entered the term Super Pet Gazette into the google search engine I learned that there were indeed many items entered. There was one which contained a list of files of the Super Pet Gazette which had been saved in pdf format. This covered some but not all issues from the beginning till the gazette ended publication in 1986.

The end of the Gazette was the decision my Commodore to quit making the Super Pet. This caused many of the members to change their alliance to the Amiga which Commodore acquired or the IBM PC which seems to think they invented the PC although Apple, Radio Shack and Commodore as well as several firms manufacturing CP/M machines had been selling personal computers before IBM thought of getting into the micro computer market.

Any way these files are found at the following:

http://6502.org/documents/publications/superpet_gazette

This will take you to the list of pdf files. I am introduced as an associate editor in Vol I issue 3. Then articles I wrote are found in almost all the remaining issues till the publication ends in 1986.

Whoops left out Watfive article

In reviewing the articles it seems that the article for Watfive was left out. Unless of course there is a new alphabet in which W comes after X! So I did a search and learned that I was writing this article about last Christmas and had written the editor that because my son had been shoot I was not quite as about my wits in writing as I might have otherwise been. This fact and the upset over the passing of my wife in Janurary of 2010 were having a deffinet effect upon my attitudes.

Then in Feb. I moved to a small town in Mississippi and was not able to keep my wife's final instructions: "Take care of my little dog." This due to moving into an apartment which did not allow pets. (You can see this little dog by searching for eronstuc on You Tube and viewing some of the videos which Ive posted. The one called the Knicks have nothing on us features a larger dog Toby and the little dog Liz playing with a ball.

Now just how much trouble would a six pound dog be in an apartment. Actually she is much more housebroken than a child who wets their diapers!.

Now to correct the ommission of the Watfive article. This was featured in the June 2011 issue and the following link will take you to the article:
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201106/page19.html

Well I don't know where the bug is but I have tried this on Firefox, Opera, and Chronium on the Full Monty and then Konqueror and Iceweasel on my Knoppix 6.5 partitions and even though the date is clearly 201106, each browser takes you to 201108/page19.html. Once there on the line manually change the 08 to 06 and hit the go key and you will then be viewing the Watfive article. As they said on Laughin years ago Hmmm Very Interesting.

The Feb. Issue covers Vala and Visual Basic

Because February is the shortest month in the year and because it is also the month in which I celebrate my birthday we will offer two languages this month. (An old family tradidion with the Ratliff's was to have the period from Jan 31 to Feb 6 as birthday week. My Mom's birthday was Jan. 31, my step-brother's birthday was Feb. 2, my birthday is Feb. 4, and my son-in-law's birthday is Feb. 6.)

The month is also known for St. Valentine's Day and suitably our language selections begin with the letter V. Vala is a relatively new language designed for the Gnome desktop of a Linux system. Visual Basic is a language freely availavble (or at least a limited version of it from Microsoft.)

The following link will take you to the article devoted to these languages:
http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201102/page20.html

Jan 2011 issue covers Unicon

An earlier post covered the Icon language. The author of the language when told that this would not function in the PCLINUX distribution told me that users should watch the links as it was still being actively developed. So if possible it would be modified to function with many versions of linux.

At present my access to the internet has been inturrupted and I am reaching it through the local library. This post will be modified to include the cover of the Jan. issue as well as other information once I have regained access to the internet from home.

To see the post of this language coverage check out the following link:

http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201101/page17.html

This schold tickle your fancy.

As I mentioned I should have the coverage for the December issue up in just a few days. SO when I checked my email I noticed that the material was available for down load. The December issue also features a catalog of gifts which any Linux fan would appreciate.

The language of the month covers Tcl/Tk and Tcl is properly pronounced as tickle.
This language is noted for the ease with which it allows graphics to be displayed.
The text introduces you to the language and the demo shows just a little of the power of the language.

Enjoy.

The text of the article will be fount at the following link:

htttp://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201012/page15.html

Three languages to be thankful for

The month of November was over before i realized that I had not posted the coverage of the languages published in the November issue of the magazine.
I received my copy of the magazine for December and noted that the language was
Tcl/Tk and I wondered what had happened to the article I wrote on Q,R.S?

So I checked my blog and learned that I last posted the coverage of Pascal in October. Perhaps I was thinking that had she lived Nov 10 would have been her 64th birthday. Or I would be thinking of the Thanksgiving Holidays ahead.

But most of all I was kept busy tending to my son who was shot in the leg on October 30. So I was quite busy running him to the hospital and to doctors appointments and getting medicine from the wrong drug stores. It seems they would tell me they called it into one store and when visited I would learn it was at the other location. Or even perchance another chain. Example the drugs the told me were called into Walgreens were actually called in to the Walmart store and not the closest one at that.

So any way featured in the November issue are three languages: Q, R, and S. All
three are statistical languages and are used a lot for creating graphical information too. The S language is proprietary. R is an open source version with most of the features of S.

As it is already December the coverage for the article on Tcl/Tk will be posted to the blog in a few days.

Here it is time for Halloween already and this month we have a special treat for you in the form of coverage of the language Pascal. This language was introduced to computing about forty years ago. That was the same time I was learning my first major language Fortran.

This fact brings back memories of my college days and courting my wife. The language has been used on many platforms and has taught millions to program using structured language techniques. The text of the article will be found at the following link:
http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201010/page19.html

I hope you enjoy the article. Till next month

The language Octave arrives in Sept.

The time is just flying by. It seems that at one time I was nearly a year ahead in the writing of my articles. However, the time I took off to mourn over the loss of my wife of nearly forty years in January has allowed the magazine to catch up with my writing.

The current issue of The New PCLINUXOS Magazine covers the language Octave. This is an open source language which is freely available. Currently I am working on writing covering the languages Vala and Visual Basic. The reason for dealing with two is that as I approach the end of the alphabet the number of languages available for specifically the PCLINUX distro of linux is decreasing. Also the amount of coverage available on these languages is also becoming scarce.

You will find my article on the language Octave at the following link:

http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201009/page19.html

Icon is the topic covered in the March 2010 article

The language selected for this issue in my language series is Icon which was developed by Dr. Griswold. This language has some very unique features. It is in the public domain and there is a web site which is chuck full of interesting applications written in icon for your use.

Also there is plenty of documentation available on this one. You will find the link to the text of this article here:

http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201003/page04.html

April 2010 issue covers the language J

As I had already included coverage of the Korn shell which I dedicated to my late wife: Trudy and also the coverage of Lisp which appeared in the June issue the next issue which we have yet to mention is the language J. This language was developed by Ken Iverson which if you read the first article in this language series was the person who developed the language and notation system: APL.

However, J uses only characters in the ASCII set so has no wierd greek letters etc. Other than that it is very APL like in the concepts it uses. You will find the text of the article from the following link:

http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201004/page20.html

July 2010 issue covers Netlogo

True to the promise to catch up on the articles which have appeared in the language series since the Dec. 2009 issue we will begin working back from the current August 2010 issue toward Jan 2010.

The article which appeared in the July issue dells with the graphic language Netlogo.
You will find the full article by clicking the following link:

http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201007/page21.html

August issue covers Modula 2

Now that a suitable period of mourning has past it is time to catch up on creating posts for the articles which have appeared in the past few months. The August issue of the magazine contains an article on the language Modula2 which was created by Wirth like the Pascal language which will be covered in an up coming issue

You may find the article on Modula 2 via the following link:
http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201008/page15.html

Note that this appear after the article on Netlogo and all other items should be in order but the article was misplaced and I had to re-send it hence it is out of order. The next issue will be about the math language Octave in September. Meanwhile I will be creating posts on the
many articles which have appeared in the language series since Dec. 2009.

June issue out covers lisp

Having completed a period of mourning it is time to resume the updating of my computer articles. Several new issues in the series on "An Alphabet of Computer Languages" have appeared in the intervening months. Also there are several articles in the magazine during the past two years for which I have yet to add entries.

The June issue covers the language Lisp which like Fortran is one of the earliest computer languages. The article may be reached from the following link:

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201006/page17.html

May article remembers wife

The last post to this was just before my wife returned from the hospital and was in the hospice process. So the last few months have been spent in mourning for her. I had intended to have my articlke on the Korn shell dedicated to her as I wrote it on her birthday. So it was dedicated but
the article serves as a memorial. Oh there is a group of rose bushes in the
front yard one of which has Yellow roses. You may guess what happened to
the best looking of these.

Here is a link to the article which is in the May 2010 issue:

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201005/page14.html

Fortran Article is out in Dec. 2009 Issue

The Dec. 2009 issue of the New PCLINUXOS Magazine was just posted to the web.
This issue marks the second anniversery of my first published ariticle in this magazine. The December 2007 issue contained my article on creating a multi disk multi system boot loader. This system is still used on my computers. The main system contains the Multimedia version of Windows XP (Media Center Edition) as well as 11 versions of Linux distributions.

The article in the Dec. 2009 issue is about my first computer language Fortran. Here you will learn that it was about 40 years ago that I took my first computer language course in Fortran IV. Also you will learn how to install various Fortran compilers on your system. Like all the articles in my computer language series the featured compiler will be for the PC Linux OS distribution if possible.

Here is a link to this article:

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200912/page16.html

Article on Elisp now on the web.

The November 2009 issue of the PCLINUXOS Magazine contains the next in my series of articles on computer languages. This one deals with the Emacs Lisp language also known
as Elisp.

This was crated by the founder of the Free Software Foundation: Richard Stallman better known as RMS.

Here is a link to the article from the November Issue of the magazine:

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200911/page15.html

As mentioned in the article you will also need to have the emacs editor installed to use this version of Lisp.

Enjoy

Latest Computer Language Article Now on Web

In the first story on this blog I mentioned that I was writng a series of articles on computer languages. The earlier articles have been on: APL, Basic, C/C++, and this one is on Dylan.

The forth coming articles will be on: Elisp, Fortran. G I forgot what it was but is uses the
Scheme dialect of Lisp, Haskell, Icon, J, Korn Shell, and Lisp. So the articles I have written have now reached the half way point of the alphabet. (Modula2 article not yet written.)

Ok here is a link to the Dylan article which just reached the web a day ago:

http://www.pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200910/page20.html

Enjoy.