[HN Gopher] BANCStar: Financial Programming Language
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       BANCStar: Financial Programming Language
        
       Author : merlinscholz
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2021-10-03 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (esolangs.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (esolangs.org)
        
       | siva7 wrote:
       | This is a joke? How does one bright enough to grasp that thing
       | can come to the conclusion that this is a good idea
        
       | merlinscholz wrote:
       | Wikipedia:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANCStar_programming_language
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | Back in the day -- like way, way back before Adobe Illustrator --
       | _the_ go-to vector illustration program for professional
       | workflows was Zenographics Mirage. Mirage ran bit-identical
       | across platforms including the VAX and PC -- because it was based
       | on a virtual machine. Its constituent applications (called Chart,
       | Ego, and Autumn) were implemented in terms of this machine. I
       | found this out by examining some example scripts; beneath a  "you
       | are not required to understand this" type comment in one of the
       | scripts were commands in Mirage's scripting language that
       | consisted of the word "do" followed by some integers.
       | 
       | Using both these scripts and the included "Op Code Monitor",
       | which flashed opcodes and their meanings as they were executed, I
       | partially reverse engineered these bytecodes and used them to add
       | new Mirage commands. One of them was a rectangle command for Ego
       | that drew polylines instead of rectangle objects, so the
       | rectangles could be rotated.
        
       | skissane wrote:
       | Previous discussions:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27870824
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6311717
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | Looks a lot like the interpreter used by the Scott Adams (not
       | Infocom) adventures.
        
       | skissane wrote:
       | BANCStar was never intended as a programming language, rather as
       | a bytecode for a programming language VM. What happened though,
       | is the vendor shipped the product to customers, some customers
       | found the VM and started writing code for it directly, which the
       | vendor never intended them to do. That is why it was such an
       | awful programming language - it was never meant to be used as
       | one. Imagine if people wrote JVM bytecode directly, without even
       | using assembler mnemonics - that would be equivalent to BANCStar.
       | 
       | If the customers were more skilled, they would have written a
       | disassembler/assembler to convert it to more reasonable syntax.
       | This is the kind of thing that "too smart by half" people do -
       | smart enough to rip off the covers and start tinkering with the
       | internals, not smart enough to build some tools to make it easier
       | for themselves. (It appears some of them eventually did do that,
       | but others just stuck with writing the stuff by hand.)
        
         | mst wrote:
         | I wonder how viable it was to write it by hand and still be
         | able to use the editor to modify the simpler parts of the file.
         | 
         | "Not being able to mix and match" has always been where I've
         | got stuck (from both directions before now) with other
         | environments.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)