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On text documentsOn text documentsPosted May 11, 2012 16:03 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: On text documents by eru Parent article: Who owns your data?
web2c (plus a C compiler) is an implementation of WEB and \ph, and is of comparable portability and complexity to dosbox, which will run your old word processors. TeX's source does contain a lot of documentation about the expected Pascal dialect and the preprocessor; but there's even more documentation about the x86 and DOS. Your old DOS programs don't come with an extensive description of the platform they run on, but they're also not the only things that use that platform, so they don't have to.
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On text documents Posted May 11, 2012 17:07 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Still have to disagree here. I'm pretty sure I could port web2c to a new platform in an evening or two, provide it has a decent ANSI C compiler (which is now a very common piece of infrastructure and can legitimately be assumed). Porting DOSBOX would be a much larger task, unless the new target is very similar to some of the existing ones. Yes, there is more documentation about x86 and DOS, because a lot more is needed to describe the complicated and ugly interface, and it is still incomplete...I have found bugs in DOSBOX, which I currently use to support some legacy cross-compilation tools at my workplace. Also used DOSEMU+FreeDOS for the same task, and found it has some different bugs... I could work around the problems for the limited set of programs that were needed. But the fact is the only thing that is completely MS-DOS compatible for all programs still is the original MS-DOS.
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