Draco (programming language)

Draco
Paradigm	imperative (procedural), structured
Designed by	Chris Gray
First appeared	early 1980s, discontinued around 1990
Typing discipline	static, strong, manifest
OS	CP/M, Amiga
License	copyrighted shareware
Filename extensions	.d .g
Influenced by
	ALGOL 68, Pascal, C

Last updated March 25, 2019

Draco was a shareware programming language created by Chris Gray. First developed for CP/M systems, Amiga version followed in 1987.^[1]

Shareware is a type of proprietary software which is initially provided free of charge to users, who are allowed and encouraged to make and share copies of the program. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website or as a compact disc included with a magazine. Shareware is available with most computer software. Shareware differs from open-source software, in which the source code is available for anyone to inspect and alter; and freeware, which is software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available.

A programming language is a formal language, which comprises a set of instructions that produce various kinds of output. Programming languages are used in computer programming to implement algorithms.

CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.

Although Draco, a blend of Pascal and C,^[2] was well suited for general purpose programming, its uniqueness as a language was its main weak point.^[3] Gray used Draco for the Amiga to create a port of Peter Langston's game Empire .

Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language, which Niklaus Wirth designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970, as a small, efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. It is named in honor of the French mathematician, philosopher and physicist Blaise Pascal.

C is a general-purpose, imperative computer programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and it has therefore found lasting use in applications that were previously coded in assembly language. Such applications include operating systems, as well as various application software for computers ranging from supercomputers to embedded systems.

Peter Langston is a computer programmer who wrote and distributed for free several games for Unix systems in the 1970s, including one of the earliest text adventure video games Wander, the original version of Empire and the program "Oracle" upon which the later net-wide Oracle was modeled. He is also an experienced jazz, rock, and folk musician.

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Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language created in 1993 by Urban Müller, and is notable for its extreme minimalism.

Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS. It was originally developed by Anders Hejlsberg at Borland, and was notable for its extremely fast compiling times. Turbo Pascal, and the later but similar Turbo C, made Borland a leader in PC-based development.

A computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), even a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.

The Lattice C Compiler was released in June 1982 by Lifeboat Associates and was the first C compiler for the IBM Personal Computer. The compiler sold for $500 and would run on PC DOS or MS-DOS. The hardware requirements were 96KB of RAM and two floppy drives. It was ported to many other platforms, such as mainframes (MVS), minicomputers (VMS), workstations (UNIX), OS/2, the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and the Sinclair QL.

Amiga E, or very often simply E, is a programming language created by Wouter van Oortmerssen on the Amiga. He has since moved on to develop the SHEEP programming language for the new AmigaDE platform and the CryScript language used during the development of the video game Far Cry.

COMAL is a computer programming language developed in Denmark by Benedict Løfstedt and Børge R. Christensen in 1973. COMAL was one of the few structured programming languages that was available for and comfortably usable on 8-bit home computers.

Draco is the Latin word for serpent or dragon.

AmigaBASIC was an interpreted BASIC programming language implementation for the Amiga, designed and written by Microsoft. AmigaBASIC shipped with AmigaOS versions 1.1 to 1.3. It succeeded MetaComCo's ABasiC, which was included in AmigaOS 1.0 and 1.1, and was superseded by ARexx, a REXX-style scripting language, from AmigaOS version 2.0 onwards.

Atari ST BASIC was the first dialect of BASIC that was produced for the Atari ST line of computers. It was bundled with all new STs in the early years of the ST's lifespan, and quickly became the standard BASIC for that platform. However, many users disliked it, and improved dialects of BASIC quickly came out to replace it.

Aladdin4D is a computer program for modeling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations, currently running on AmigaOS and Mac OS X platforms. A-EON Technology Ltd owns the rights and develops current and future versions of Aladdin4D for AmigaOS, MorphOS & AROS. All other platforms including OS X, iOS, Windows & Linux are developed by DiscreetFX.

Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer, and were not ported from other platforms.

Amazing Computing was a computer magazine devoted to the Amiga computer. It was published by PiM Publications of Fall River, Massachusetts, United States, from 1985 to (sporadically) 1999. Other Amiga publications from PiM include AC's Tech for the Amiga and AC's Guide. The publisher was Don Hicks.

Imagine was the name of a cutting-edge 3D modeling and ray tracing program, originally for the Amiga computer and later also for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. It was created by Impulse, Inc. It used the .iob extension for its objects. Imagine was a derivative of the software TurboSilver, which was also for the Amiga and written by Impulse. CAD-Technologies continued the distribution of the Amiga version. Starting with version 5.1, new updates were available for free for current customers as part of the Amiga Constant Upgrade Program (ACUP) up until presumed Imagine 6.0 release.

Miggybyte was a free disk-based magazine for the Amiga range of computers, published by Pickled Fish Software and edited by Ben Gaunt. From 1995 to 1997 twelve issues were published all being on a single floppy disk only.

Retargetable graphics is a device driver API mainly used by third-party graphics hardware to interface with AmigaOS via a set of libraries. The software libraries may include software tools to adjust resolution, screen colors, pointers, and screenmodes. It will use available hardware and will not extend the capabilities in any way.

Rashumon was a multilingual graphical word processor developed for the Amiga computer by an Israel-based company called HarmonySoft and was sold until after the demise of Commodore in 1994. Rashumon had particular support for Hebrew, Arabic and Russian as well as English, and it could send its text to speech synthesis in English.

Julia is a high-level general-purpose dynamic programming language whose designers intend it to address the needs of high-performance numerical analysis and computational science, without the need of separate compilation to be fast. It is also useful for low-level systems programming, as a specification language, with work being done on client and server web use.

Dr. T's Music Software was a software company based in Massachusetts. Development was started in 1984 by Emile Tobenfeld. The company operated until the mid-1990s, and developed music software for the Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Commodore Amiga, Macintosh and mainly the Atari ST.

References

↑ Foust, John (August 1987). "The AMICUS Network, New Fish disks". Amazing Computing. Vol. 2 no. 8. PiM Publications. p. 85. ISSN 0886-9480.
↑ "PD Toolbox". AmigaWorld Tech Journal. Vol. 1 no. 1. IDG Communications. April 1991. p. 24. ISSN 1054-4631.
↑ Quaid, Patrick (May 1988). "Proletariat Programming A Look at Freely Distributable Compilers for the Amiga". Amazing Computing. Vol. 3 no. 5. PiM Publications. p. 82. ISSN 0886-9480.

External links

Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' FTP sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web. According to Aminet, as of 1 April 2013, it has 80592 packages online.

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[1] Foust, John (August 1987). "The AMICUS Network, New Fish disks". Amazing Computing. Vol. 2 no. 8. PiM Publications. p. 85. ISSN 0886-9480.

[2] "PD Toolbox". AmigaWorld Tech Journal. Vol. 1 no. 1. IDG Communications. April 1991. p. 24. ISSN 1054-4631.

[3] Quaid, Patrick (May 1988). "Proletariat Programming A Look at Freely Distributable Compilers for the Amiga". Amazing Computing. Vol. 3 no. 5. PiM Publications. p. 82. ISSN 0886-9480.