kdw1@tank.uchicago.edu (Keith Waclena) (03/22/89)
Has anyone ever had any luck running the interpreter for the REC programming language that's available on simtel20 in pc-blue.vol21[45]? I'm very interested in it, but the binaries won't work for me on any PC or compatible I've ever tried them on. Specifically, the interpreter won't run programs from a file. If you type in expressions from the keyboard they seem to work, but none of the sample programs in files will run. I always get an error message that says: ``Rd ovfl'' (approximately). This program is quite old (in PC terms); is it possible that there's a major incompatibility between the then current version of DOS and today's versions? I don't know anything about 808[86] assembly language, but I'm about to take a crack at the source and was wondering if anyone has already solved this problem. For those of you that have read this far, REC is a very terse, cryptic language that should appeal to those of you that enjoy programming in Teco or Trac. The main source of REC's obscurity is its single-letter variable names and a TECO-like tendency towards using most of the ASCII character set for single-character operator names. Nevertheless, the language is very powerful and the demonstration programs show that it's easy to write parsers for other languages in it. My real interest in the language (aside from a long-standing fascination with cryptic programming languages) is that REC is used as the machine code for another language called CONVERT, which is a very powerful high-level text-processing language with much of the power of Snobol. A CONVERT compiler is included in the REC distribution. Of course, I can't run CONVERT if I can't run the REC interpreter. If anyone can help me, please send mail. If you have any experience with the language distinct from this specific IBM PC implementation, I'd like to hear about it. Finally, I've unearthed a few citations to old articles about these two languages if anyone is interested. Keith -- Keith Waclena keith@cerberus.uchicago.edu TIRA / U of Chicago keith%cerberus@uchimvs1.bitnet 1100 E.57th.St Chi IL 60637 ...uunet!cerberus.uchicago.edu!keith