Mastodawn

What's not in my profile?

I used to be a huge Wirth-ian in the 1990s and spewed excellent tirades against the evils of C. Niklaus Wirth is also my "PhD grandfather" via Michael Franz at #UCIrvine.

I prefer lecturing sitting down in front of a laptop and talking while I do stuff on said laptop. I very much dislike slides and prefer chalk and blackboard for things like data structures.

I got my "15 minutes of fame" served unexpectedly:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get
https://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/students-get-class-wide-as-by.html
https://archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/gaming-the-system/

But it still was fun.

I got my undergraduate degree from https://www.cs.hm.edu/ which back then was not allowed to feed into PhD programs. It's a thing in Germany: Everything is tiered and changing the tiers requires a change to the constitution of the republic (I am joking, but not really) so it takes a while. (Nowadays it would be easier to go on to a PhD from there.) The "plus" was that I spent two semesters in industry. In one I quickly out-FORTRAN-ed my boss, in the other I learned C++ from Stroustrup in two weeks while riding the bus. Beat that Ivy League!

I grew up on #c64 #basic and #mos6502 (well, #mos6510 I guess) assembly, went on to #m68k assembly, #gfabasic and lots of #oberon. Of course I was dabbling in #modula2, #prolog, #scheme, and more. Then it was mostly whatever I needed so #fortran, #cpp, #java, lots of #python, lots more #c, lots more #arm and #x86 assembly, some #golang, some #ocaml, some #csharp even if you can believe it. Nowadays it's pretty much #c all day with chunks of #python and bits of #rust now and then. And chunks of #bash too.

(Proudly self-plagiarized off of a few 2023/2024 posts from my previous account.) #introduction #SorryItsLate

Students boycott final to challenge professor's grading policy (and get As)

To test limits of Johns Hopkins professor's scaled grading policy, all of his students boycott the final -- and all get As as a result.

Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

ATARI pixels and artists Jan 19

Atari ST daily pixel art

« Toon », 1988
by Florent Coste, aka pépé / HMD
Atari ST animation, 36 frames, 320x200, 16 colours (GFA Basic animation demo)

#atari #atariart #ataripixelart #demoscene #atariST #atariSTe #320x200pixels #16colours #Neochrome #DegasElite #GFABasic

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Regionales Retro-Rechenzentrum Oct 24, 2025

@scruss The “IDE” as you’d call it nowadays (the interpreter) of GFA-Basic didn’t run on all TOS versions to begin with, yes, and needed patches for rather new ones.

But the compiled code would run easily on TOS 1.04, for example, not just TOS 1.02. Unless the author did something rather dirty, like assuming fixed addresses in the memory map, and circumvented OS routines.

BTW: DYK that there are patched versions now of GFA-Basic for multitasking TOS setups? :)

#gfabasic

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Regionales Retro-Rechenzentrum Jul 29, 2025

@Nowhereman Genau. Die erste Festplatte, 20 MB MFM an MFM-SCSI-ACSI-Adapter („SH205“), wurde gleich in _fünf_ Partitionen unterteilt. Weil der neue Treiber, CBHD, ja mehr als 4 Partitionen konnte. Mußte man dann ja auch nutzen!

Gut,die letzte Partition hatte nur 3,6 MB, aber für GFA-Basic 2.0 und Compiler reichte es.

#atarist #gfabasic #frühefestplatten

Rajah Lone

Jul 19, 2025

Now I will have fun coding dis!

#GFABasic #V4SA #AtariST #FreeMiNT

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Digital Mark λ ☕️ 8647 Oct 22, 2024

There's a long "GfA: Grafik für Anspruchsvolle" (for the discerning?) type-in which seems to be a mid-sized paint program? Which is SILLY given that the ST had many good paint programs, like Degas Elite, Neochrome (HAM hi-color), etc.

Also wow I forget how annoying GFA BASIC is to read, it had one statement per line, no structs, so

If Ho=1
Hoehe=6
Endif

etc for 600 lines. Auto-indents at least.

I wrote many large programs in it.

#atari #retrocomputing #basic #gfabasic

Atari Scene News Jul 27, 2024

Shotgun, work in progresss game for #AtariST computers. Video: https://youtu.be/fe6VFUnHiWA Info: https://anarcholab.itch.io/shotgun-st #atari #retrogames #retrogames #GFABASIC

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Retrópolis Apr 4, 2024

Episódio 151 – Another / Out of This World – Parte A

https://retropolis.com.br/2024/04/03/episodio-151-parte-a/

#Podcast #Amiga #AnotherWorld #Apple #atari #AtariSt #Commodore #DanielMorais #DelphineSoftware #DragonsLair #EGA #ricChahi #FabienSanglard #Frana #FutureWars #GFABASIC #IbmPc #Interplay #JeanFranoisFreitas #JeannedArc #jogo #Macintosh #MegaDrive #Nintendo #OutOfThisWorld #OuterWorld #PaulCuisset #podcast #Retrocomputao #Retrpolis #sega #SNES #Tandy #TGA #USGold #VGA #VirginGames

Episódio 151 – Another / Out of This World – Parte A - Retrópolis

Bem-vindos ao podcast Retrópolis! Apresentado pela Municipalidade de Retrópolis. Esta é a Parte A do Episódio 151. Sobre o episódio Este episódio é totalmente dedicado ao jogo Another World, ou Out of This World, dependendo do computador onde o cidadão retropolitano jogou. Evidente que um jogo tão apaixonante e importante precisava de um episódio à

Retrópolis - A cidade dos clássicos