Open-source News

Scalefusion Introduces Linux Device Management  PR Newswire

RPM Lands Support For x86_64 Microarchitecture Feature Levels  Phoronix

The RPM package manager code has added support for the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels that allow for newer baseline targets than conventional x86_64. This support in RPM allows for installing RPMs built for newer feature levels on capable hardware...

System76 teases features coming in homegrown Rust-based desktop COSMIC  The Register

Exclusive MUO Deal: Get ONLYOFFICE Home Server for Half the ...  MUO - MakeUseOf

The work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" around fast-linking with the graphics pipeline library (GPL) extension continues as the Linux graphics driver developers at Valve continue making remarkable progress...

More Of Valve's RADV Optimizations Around Fast-Linking Reach ...  Phoronix

Dwarf Fortress made over $7 million in January  GamingOnLinux

LibreOffice 7.5 released on-schedule this morning as the newest version of this cross-platform, free software office suite to rival Microsoft Office...

Microsoft on Wednesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230126-2.0 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of use-cases from within Azure infrastructure over to WSL purposes...

Microsoft CBL-Mariner 2.0 Update Adds New PipeWire, Other ...  Phoronix

LibreOffice 7.5 Open-Source Office Suite Officially Released, This Is What’s New  9to5Linux

New Humble Bundle celebrates Black Creators and Characters  GamingOnLinux

How to Set up and manage your Website with Linux VPS Hosting?  Digital Journal

Embedded Linux Market Report 2023 Brief Observation to 2029 ...  Digital Journal

MS Office Alternative Software for Linux Market Statistical Forecast ...  Trending in Pakistan

Arm Publishes Initial Confidential Compute Architecture "CCA" Code ...  Phoronix

Arm ended out January by publishing an early request for comments (RFC) version of its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) support for the Linux kernel so there can be KVM virtualization integration around Arm CCA, a KVM user-space ABI for managing Realms, and Linux guest support for Arm Realms...

Learn Basic by coding a game Moshe Zadka Thu, 02/02/2023 - 03:00

Writing the same application in multiple languages is a great way to learn new ways to program. Most programming languages have certain things in common, such as:

• Variables
• Expressions
• Statements

These concepts are the basis of most programming languages. Once you understand them, you can start figuring the rest out.

Programming languages usually share some similarities. Once you know one programming language, you can learn the basics of another by recognizing its differences.

Practicing with a standard program is a good way of learning a new language. It allows you to focus on the language, not the program's logic. I'm doing that in this article series using a "guess the number" program, in which the computer picks a number between one and 100 and asks you to guess it. The program loops until you guess the number correctly.

This program exercises several concepts in programming languages:

• Variables
• Input
• Output
• Conditional evaluation
• Loops

It's a great practical experiment to learn a new programming language. This article focuses on Basic.

Guess the number in (Bywater) Basic

There is no real standard for the Basic programming language. Wikipedia says, "BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages designed for ease of use." The BWBasic implementation is available under the GPL.

You can explore Basic by writing a version of the "guess the number" game.

Install Basic on Linux

In Debian or Ubuntu, you can install Basic with the following:

$ apt install -y bwbasic

Download the latest release tarball for Fedora, CentOS, Mageia, and any other Linux distribution. Extract it, make it executable, and then run it from a terminal:

$ tar --extract --file bwbasic*z $ chmod +x bywater $ ./bywater 

On Windows, download the .exe release.

Basic code

Here is my implementation:

10 value$ = cint(rnd * 100) + 1 20 input "enter guess"; guess$ 30 guess$ = val(guess$) 40 if guess$ < value$ then print "Too low" 50 if guess$ > value$ then print "Too high" 60 if guess$ = value$ then 80 70 goto 20 80 print "That's right"

Programming and development Red Hat Developers Blog Programming cheat sheets Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription eBook: An introduction to programming with Bash Bash shell scripting cheat sheet eBook: Modernizing Enterprise Java An open source developer's guide to building applications

Basic programs can be numbered or unnumbered. Usually, it is better to write programs unnumbered, but writing them with numbered lines makes it easier to refer to individual lines.

By convention, coders write lines as multiples of 10. This approach allows interpolating new lines between existing ones for debugging. Here's an explanation of my method above:

• Line 10: Computes a random value between 1 and 100 using the built-in rnd function, which generates a number between 0 and 1, not including 1.
• Line 20: Asks for a guess and puts the value in the guess$ scalar variable. Line 30 converts the value to a numeric one.
• Lines 40 and 50: Give the guesser feedback, depending on the comparison.
• Line 70: Goes to the beginning of the loop.
• Line 60: Breaks& the loop by transferring control to line 80. Line 80 is the last line, so the program exits after that.

Sample output

The following is an example of the program after putting it in program.bas:

$ bwbasic program.bas  Bywater BASIC Interpreter/Shell, version 2.20 patch level 2 Copyright (c) 1993, Ted A. Campbell Copyright (c) 1995-1997, Jon B. Volkoff enter guess? 50 Too low enter guess? 75 Too low enter guess? 88 Too high enter guess? 80 Too low enter guess? 84 Too low enter guess? 86 Too high enter guess? 85 That's rightGet started

This "guess the number" game is a great introductory program for learning a new programming language because it exercises several common programming concepts in a pretty straightforward way. By implementing this simple game in different programming languages, you can demonstrate some core concepts of the languages and compare their details.

Do you have a favorite programming language? How would you write the "guess the number" game in it? Follow this article series to see examples of other programming languages that might interest you!

This tutorial lets you explore Basic by writing a version of the "guess the number" game.

Programming What to read next This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

SAP and Red Hat Deepen Partnership to Power SAP Software ...  Technuter