A rant... Post: 303023589

Sponsored Content

The Lounge What is on Your Mind? A rant... Post 303023589 by Corona688 on Wednesday 19th of September 2018 01:38:26 PM

09-19-2018

Registered User

They have to start somewhere, and have to want to. Having the vague idea they want to program won't motivate them to crack books thicker than their wrist. Most people never learn this stuff, and they're only nine!

Whatever they begin with should be simple and interactive. Mindstorm(or whatever Lego calls it now) might do the trick and won't kill them. I learned QBASIC and even now still use it a few times a year to rapidly visualize something - drawing one graphical line in QBASIC is "MODE 12", "LINE (X,X)-(Y,Y),color". Name a "real" language which can do that without five times as much preamble!

Anyway, young also means sharp. They will quickly discover the limitations of whatever tinkertoy language you give them, and that may motivate them to learn something better. I hated that couldn't do STRING=print a,b,c in BASIC. But I found that feature in C as "sprintf", which ended up leading me to Linux, UNIX, Web Development, networking, shell, and my career up to now.

Last edited by Corona688; 09-19-2018 at 02:48 PM..

Corona688

View Public Profile for Corona688

Visit Corona688's homepage!

Find all posts by Corona688

2 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Where can I rant?

First of all, apologies to the admins for not reading the rules totally and missing the bit about ranting off about other OSs. But that raises a question. Where do you go to have a good rant, to vent your disgust at various corporations and thier hideous behaviour? :confused:

2. What is on Your Mind?

One liners, quick rant...

Hi fellas and fella-esses... There are numerous threads on here where people ask for, and often expect, solutions to difficult problems solved using _one_liners_. Why do they insist as such when it is virtually no different in execution time with well thought out indented code? Is it me...

LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

audio2tape

audio2tape(1)							     Emulators							     audio2tape(1)

NAME

       audio2tape - Sinclair ZX Spectrum audio to tape file converter

SYNOPSIS

       audio2tape [-t type] [-s] [-r] [-k] [-z level] [-c level] infile outfile

DESCRIPTION

       audio2tape converts audio files to ZX Spectrum tape images.

OPTIONS

       -t type
	      causes  type to be used as the level detection trigger. There are two triggers implemented; the simple trigger just uses a threshold
	      value to convert to a one or zero on output, and the schmitt trigger implements a Schmitt trigger which outputs a less noisy signal,
	      but requires a stronger signal to noise ratio than the simple trigger. The default trigger is "schmitt".

       -s     causes  the  display of a frequency graph showing the sound levels present in the audio file. This can be useful when selecting good
	      crossover points.

       -r     causes any ROM blocks that are recognised to use idealised timing figures rather than the exact ones found in the audio file.

       -k     causes the tape file that is produced to keep any audio data from the original audio file that isn't  recognised.  This  will  allow
	      unsupported loading schemes, encryption tones etc. to be preserved in the file that is produced.

       -z level
	      causes  level  to  be used as the zero point in the supplied audio file, it allows adjustment for a DC offset in the audio file. The
	      default level is 127 from a range of 0-255.

       -c level
	      causes level to be used as the Schmitt trigger noise threshold, this reduces the sensitivity to noise  in  the  provided	file.  The
	      default level is 8 from a range of 0-127.

       infile specifies the audio file to be converted. This file can be in any of the tape formats supported by libaudiofile.

       outfile
	      specifies  the output tape file. The format will be determined by the file extension and can be in any of the formats libspectrum(3)
	      supports for output.

BUGS

       None known.

SEE ALSO

       fuse(1), fuse-utils(1), libspectrum(3), listbasic(1), tapeconv(1), tzxlist(1), snap2tzx(1), tape2wav(1)

       The comp.sys.sinclair Spectrum FAQ, at
       http://www.worldofspectrum.org/faq/index.html.

AUTHOR

       Fredrick Meunier (fredm@spamcop.net).

Version 1.0.0							16th December, 2010						     audio2tape(1)