Seriously thinking of what it might be like to have an immutable OS that just drops you into #qbsh. Like, go full on #Commodore64, #Atari, #Apple with it - boot a ROM that drops to a BASIC shell. Like, we take #Linux, and throw POSIX out the window, and include bash for the sake of compatibility and to offload IO that hasn't been natively implemented yet. Using something like #Fedora IoT for the base with automatic updates and using qsh scripts as much as possible for background operations.
TL;DR: You pass bincapz a program that runs on a UNIX flavor, and it'll try to tell you what it might try to do via dumb yet surprisingly effective static analysis.
I have to admit that the experience of managing the file systems on these early 1990s floppy disks could be a little better out of box on #Fedora#Linux. For one, it attempts to read ext4 then iso9660 before doing FAT32/16/12. And Gnome Disks gives all sorts of weird behavior. It's almost like testing priorities have moved away from 1.44MB floppies in recent years.
@r3vilo That was also true for CP/M before DOS. The Osborne One came with a disk that had both CBASIC 2 and MBASIC (C64 had a subset of MBASIC they licensed from Microsoft).
DOS started as a CP/M clone, so it makes sense they copied most of the shell.
And if you want to relive a little of both, that's why I wrote #qbsh, which is loosely based on C64 and CP/M and written in QBASIC.
Also, while #qbsh was written primarily for Linux, it is very non-POSIX. A better description is that it's a nostalgic almost-replacement for a modern OS shell. While there are a few practical advantages, it's more for those moments when you just happen to miss CP/M, PDP, or Commodore but still need to use a modern system.
I'm pleased to announce that #qbsh has a new release! Version 1.1.0 is out with significant improvements in the shell pipe handling for interactive CLI programs like vim.
A minor update to #qbsh is in the works. I'm adding the ability to run qbsh scripts from the interactive shell and to chain further scripts from within a script, without having to set the #! and +x bit first.
Some lucky soul just might get one of these very, very limited edition bad-label #qbsh floppies, which will no doubt be worth more than the regular label floppies on ebay at some future point.
Part of me is tempted to use #UBlue to make a custom #Fedora#Silverblue image to add in the Pop_OS Gnome extensions, make #vim the default editor, and #Thunderbird the default mail reader and call it "Blue Bacon Linux"
I asked ChatGPT and another AI to generate qbsh scripts and even gave it commands like CALC and PIP to incorporate. It clearly had bash in the crunchbang. When I suggested it wasn't qbsh, it apologized, removed that line and told me it was more using correct syntax and not "bash built-ins" and hallucinated qbsh commands that don't exist like GREP. It was pretty hilarious.
Close to none of this is true whatsoever. It was partly inspired by #Commodore64, but also by CP/M. And while #qbsh does support basic scripting, it is very much not BASIC compatible with any retro BASIC platform.
qbsh won't teach you to program in #BASIC by using it, even though it is #opensource and written in QBASIC, but to that end, qbsh won't teach you how to code in BASIC any more than #bash will teach you to code in C.
I'm going to bring some of these with me to #SCaLE this week. If you're running a current #Fedora on a machine with a floppy drive, come find me and I just might let you have one of them.