V7R1M0 is the version I see in spool files generated in the IBM i server used in my company. Does this version support fully free RPG flavor where even F and D specs can be written in free format? How can this be found out? I have copy pasted few of fully free code samples the available on the internet and it gets highlighted in error which suggests it doesn't work.
Please note that no RDI is available in my company. So this was done in SEU. I have researched a lot about this but there is no definitive guide that can confirm this point
SEU does not now nor will it ever support anything released after v6.1. If you want to use features of RPG released in the last 7 years you either have to turn off syntax validation in SEU, or use RDi. There are other options of course, see What is the best IDE to use for programming in RPGILE for the AS/400 ? Can you connect to a 400 using Visual Studios IDE? for more info. Note that only RDi is guaranteed to support the most recent RPG developments. Third party editors may lag behind while developers determine how to support new features. In addition, some of these editors only support source code in the IFS.
Related
How can I read special characters from a external file ? Here a simple .txt file in French, which content is the first paragraph of https://fr.lipsum.com/ : as you can see on my screenshot, the file encoding is UTF-8 but the accents are not displayed correctly.
I tried various encodings within notepad++ and in my perl6 script, like these :
enc => "utf8"
enc => "latin1"
With Python or Ruby scripts I don't encounter the problem. I can't found any precise example about that matter, probably because perl 6 is still quite recent (??). Thank you.
My script as it is displayed in the screenshot :
my $text_contents = slurp "testfile.txt", enc => "utf8";
say $text_contents;
prompt;
Final edit : the solution is to enable an option, available in beta state with Windows 10 1803, to make the OS handle unicode characters properly : see answers and comments below ...
If you're not using Windows
This SO is either entirely or almost entirely irrelevant to you.
If you're using Windows 10
Check the "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" option checkbox.
At least at the time I originally wrote this answer, text near this Unicode related checkbox claimed it's for programs that do not support Unicode, but you should just ignore that.[1]
At the time I originally wrote this answer the checkbox was found under control panel, "Region" entry, "Administrative" tab, "Change system locale" button.
Microsoft may have changed this stuff since I wrote this answer, and may change it again, eg by moving and/or renaming the checkbox, or making things more involved than just clicking a single checkbox.
Per their comment below this answer, the OP notes:
For those who are interested in that particular option, it can be found in the "legacy" Control panel of windows -> Region -> Administrative -> Edit settings...
If you're using an older version of Windows
Arguably, the good news is that Raku and Rakudo have some of the world's best modern support for Unicode, and the OK news is that it relies on Microsoft correctly supporting Unicode, which they're now trying to do.
The bad news is that they made a lot of mistakes in older versions of Windows (and even in Windows 10, which they're now trying to fix), so any solution will be constrained by those mistakes. (Perhaps the biggest problem is Microsoft's doublespeak on the topic[1], but let's hope we can work around that.)
That all said, please read the following and then either return to searching for solutions or post a fresh SO question and we'll try to help.
Quoting Wikipedia's page Unicode in Microsoft Windows:
they are still in 2018 improving their operating system support for UTF-8
Microsoft got off on the wrong foot with their Unicode support last century. The good news is that they have at last begun digging their way out of the hole they dug for themselves and everyone else.
But they're definitely not there yet -- not at the time of originally writing this answer, and, I suspect not for another N years -- at least inasmuch as things don't work correctly out of the box for many end users. I think this is the root of most problems with Unicode on Windows.
Older languages like Python, Ruby and Perl came up with a range of hacks that hid the many problems with Microsoft's older UTF8 support from most users in simple scenarios by using what Microsoft ironically described as "Unicode support".
This has always come with the trade-off that things get very hairy or even completely unworkable for more complex applications in many locales around the world. (So much so that even the mighty Microsoft finally capitulated in 2018.)
In essence, until this new Microsoft effort to get with the program, software that ran on Windows has had no alternative but to either use their fundamentally broken "Unicode support" or to actually support Unicode properly.[1]
Raku and Rakudo focused on the latter, and problems with it when run on Windows are related to this conflicting with Microsoft's old broken approach. Fortunately Microsoft is now getting with the program and so we may be able find a way to get around problems you have with Unicode on Windows provided you are patient.
In particular, if you are using an older Windows version, please expect it to not work at first with modern Unicode aware software unless you are lucky. We'll still help if we can, but it'll likely involve you being patient with us and Microsoft and Rakudo and vice-versa.
Footnotes
[1] At the time I originally wrote this answer, there is text near the checkbox that it's for programs that do not support Unicode. This is entirely the opposite of what's really going on, but hey, it's Microsoft.
My last experience with visual programming was with VB 6.0. So it's been awhile. Now I need a C code developement environment to interface with another tool. It would be nice to work in a visual programming and event driven IDE similar to my VB experience. The other tool vendor suggested installing the free VS 2015 Community package. What is the best way to download, install and get me up and running in this C code environment?
Download Visual Studio Community 2017 here:
https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/community
You don't need to install the full blown thing anymore, just pick the blocks your want to use. If you need more later on you can simply add more blocks.
It is free, and there are boatloads of samples around (check https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/ for instance) to get you started.
Probably "microsoft official site" but i'd not recommended "comunity edition" just for one reason : [it's a bit overloaded], i know it may feels good to have space for growing up, but in fact (probably) you'll barely try a quarter stuffs they present for you. Before you become a "GURU" they will be just spotted your eyes and (a bit) slow down progress.
If you'll want do your codding on Windows 7 or earlier, you'd better try a (minimalistic) "Visual studio express 2013" (Same stuff, but more strict functionality). And... if you would try Visual studio express, it better to choose a version "x86", i cant say that does matters on "C", but if you'll start programming openGL, it's saves you a lot of nerves (64x has a several big errors)
According to swift.org/migration-guide, dispatch and related functions have a great new swift interface (e.g. dispatch_async -> DispatchQueue.async). Also other foundation types have been added like Data and Date value types instead of NSData and NSDate.
However, on the open source version of swift3 (developer preview 1) on linux, ubuntu15.10 the compiler rejects all of these changes. In fact, looking at the open source version of swift and swift-corelibs on github, I don't actually see any of these changes. Since it will compile on XCode developer preview, this has lead me to believe either: I am doing something wrong on Linux or these changes have been made in the Apple branch and not the open source branch. Can anyone verify this and if the latter is the case, and if so, how do we know what changes will be in the Apple branch vs the open source branch?
As of Swift 3.0 release version GCD is available on Linux with simple import Dispatch, which is slightly confusing as it's not needed on iOS/macOS, where Dispatch module is imported by default.
Thanks to Brad Larson for finding the Foundation and Dispatch overlays in the source. According to swift.org:
SDK Overlays: Specific to Apple platforms, the SDK overlays
(implemented in stdlib/public/SDK) provide Swift-specific additions
and modifications to existing Objective-C frameworks to improve their
mapping into Swift. In particular, the Foundation overlay provides
additional support for interoperability with Objective-C code.
tl;dr anything in these folders are Apple platforms only. Still not sure why they restricted the Dispatch overlays to Apple Platforms since libdispatch is also open source and targeting linux, but this answers my initial question.
Edit: was able to confirm via swift mailing lists that the dispatch overlays do have some reliance on objective-c runtime. There is work to get them implemented for non-Darwin platforms but no guarantees on timing.
Check out the Swift 3 Evolution Github page. They list all the proposed changes to the language, and separate them by those that have been implemented and those that have not. Proposal SE-0088: Modernize libdispatch for Swift 3 naming is on the "yet to be implemented list" as are many other changes.
As far as Data and Date are concerned, I cannot say, since I believe that is part of the upcoming Core Libraries, and I have not yet been able to look at those in great detail yet. Perhaps you might check the Swift Core-Libs Github page as well, though the status page references work done on NSData and NSDate, no mention of the newer data types.
The reason? Pure nostalgia.
Anyway, there was a standard for Basic that was published in the late 80s or early 90s. It was probably ISO/IEC 10279:1991, but I don't have access to that and cannot be sure.
Whatever this standard was, some of the syntax made its way into Borlands Turbo Basic and Microsofts Visual Basic. I never learned any significant amount of VB, but Turbo Basic is one of those things I played with in my mis-spent youth.
At one time, my main reference was an article published in one of the main computing periodicals - maybe Personal Computer World, maybe Byte.
A scan of that article (if anyone can even identify it) would be great, but all I really want is a few pages quick reference of that standard syntax. Must be free (I'm not that nostalgic), but it must describe the standard syntax - the whole point is to sort out what is standard as opposed to VB or whatever.
EDIT The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that this standard was available around 1987 or 1988. Maybe it was the earlier non-full version of the standard above, or maybe it was pre-acceptance of the standard.
Take a look at this PDF of a Dartmouth College BASIC manual from October 1964 if you're awash in nostalgia. Dartmouth's then-president John Kemeny invented the language (as you may know) and the 1960s and 70s-era Dartmouth Time Sharing System offered the language for its users to run programs on ancient GE mainframes in one of the first shared environments out there. (Find out more about DTSS here.)
The ANSI standardization process was underway in the mid-80's and Kemeny & Kurtz (the original inventors of BASIC) founded "True Basic" to market a standard BASIC to the PC market. Around this same time the 8th edition of BASIC on DTSS was renamed "Dartmouth Standard Basic", to emphasize its standard compliance.
True Basic hewed pretty closely to the ANSI standard, but I haven't been able to find a copy for their reference manual online. This list of TB functions and commands may give you some idea though.
I've been playing around with Direct3D 11 a little bit lately and have been frustrated by the lack of documentation on the basics of the API (such as simple geometry rendering). One of the points of confusion brought on by the sparse documentation is the (apparent) move away from the use of effects for shaders.
In D3D11 all of the effect (.fx) support has been removed from the D3DX libraries and buried away in a hard to find (sparsely documented, of course) shared source library. None of the included examples use it, preferring instead to compile HLSL files directly. All of this says to me that Microsoft is trying to get people to stop using the effect file format. Is that true? Is there any documentation of any kind that states that? I'm fine doing it either way, but for years now they've been promoting the .fx format so it seems odd that they would suddenly decide to drop it.
Many professional game and graphics developers don't use the effects interfaces in Direct3D, and many of the leading game engines do not use them either. Instead, custom material/effects subsystems are built on top of the lower-level shader and graphics state state management facilities. This allows developers to do things like target both Direct3D and OpenGL through a common asset management pipeline.
The main issue is that the fx_5_0 profile which is needed to compile Effects 11 shaders with the required metadata is deprecated by the HLSL compiler team. The runtime is shared-source, but the compiler is not. In the latest D3DCompiler (#47) it emits a warning about this. fx_5_0 was never updated for some newer language aspects in DirectX 11.1 and 11.2, but works "as is" for Direct3D 11.
The second issue is that you need D3DCompile APIs at runtime to make use of Effects 11. Since D3DCompile was 'development only' for Windows Store apps for Windows 8.0 and Windows phone 8.0, it wasn't an option there. It is technically possible to use Effects 11 today with Windows Store apps for Windows 8.1 and Windows phone 8.1 since D3DCompile #47 is part of the OS and includes the 'deprecated/as-is' compiler support for fx_5_0, but this use is not encouraged.
The bulk of the DirectX SDK samples and all the Windows Store samples avoid use of Effects 11. I did post a few Win32 desktop samples that use it to GitHub.
UPDATE: With the release of the legacy Microsoft.DXSDK.D3DX NuGet repacking of the original D3DX #43, I was able to update the rest of the legacy DirectX SDK samples so they can build with the modern Windows SDK and not require the legacy DirectX SDK to be installed. Most of the Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 10 samples, and a few Direct3D 11 samples, all use legacy Effects. See GitHub.
So in short, yes you are discouraged from using it but you still can at the moment if you can live with the disclaimers.
I'm in the exact same position, and after Googling like crazy for even the simplest sample that uses D3DX11CreateEffectFromMemory, I've too come to the conclusion that .fx file support isn't their highest prio. Although it is strange that they've added the EffectGroup concept, which is new to 11, if they don't want us to use it.
I've played a little with the new reflection API, so it looks like it will be pretty easy to hack together your own functions for setting variables etc, in essence creating your own Effect-class, and the next step is going to be to see what support their is for creating render state blocks via the API. Being able to edit those directly in the .fx file was very nice, so hopefully something like that still exists (or, at worst, I can rip that part from the Effect11 code).
There is an effect runtime provided as a sample in the DirectX SDK that should be able to help you to use .fx files.
Check out the directory: %DXSDK_DIR%\Samples\C++\Effects11
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff476261(v=VS.85).aspx
This suggests that it can take a shader or an effect.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff476190(v=VS.85).aspx
Also, what is the difference between a shader and an effect?