(PPX branch, + my own Patch 1)
This is a slightly patched version of Jos Visser's OpenComal 0.2.6 (stable branch).
Since my recent efforts, and having already reached out to the original author of the project, Jos Visser, he has been briefly corresponding with me over the past 2-3 days, and I am now very happy to announce that his own work (the original project) for OpenComal is now online (with weird timing because i was attempting this at the same time). His github is actually new and he has made his own new changes to his original codebase + improvements of his own. Reach his work here: https://github.com/josvisser66/opencomal and here: https://www.josvisser.nl/opencomal/www/
OLD text from 2-3 days ago:
When trying to run the latest stable or instable OpenComal on more or
less recent versions of Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 10.04), the
included Linux binaries opencomal and opencomalrun immediately
crashed on startup. For me, they only worked on ancient Ubuntu
6.06. Simply re-compiling the sources did not help, so I tracked down
the problem and fixed it in the C sources.
So after 3 or 5 years of being unavailable on new Linux distributions, the year 2012 starts with the return of COMAL, the much improved, PASCAL-flavoured dialect of the (in)famous BASIC programming language.
I don't know. He DID answer my e-mail. His own work has been updating since before I heard back from him and his own work on this project can be found here:
https://github.com/josvisser66/opencomal
And here:
https://www.josvisser.nl/opencomal/www/
Legally there should not be any problem because OpenComal is licensed under the GPL.
Never mind, just type anything, and it will appear. Or hit the backspace key first (kudos to Harald Arnesen for this hint).
I will not. As far as I am concerned, OpenCOMAL is just a fun retrocomputing project that allows you to run old COMAL code on Linux systems without requiring an emulator, and to find out how programming felt like in the seventies or eighties of the previous century. Having said that, I will consider pull requests that come with a nice description and readable code.
- Børge R. Christensen's COMAL Reference Guide (for COMAL 0.14 on the C-64)
- Wikipedia has useful COMAL entries in German, English, and Polish.