AB.TXT

This is the Abundance project source AS IS.

It comes in four pieces:
AB.zip the Abundance compiler, requires BBL.
BBL.ZIP the BBL Forth compiler
GEN.ZIP the application skeletons (application library)
JPW.ZIP a simple sample application.

Abundance is a computer language I devised back in the early 80s.  In many ways
it is still ahead of its time.  Many of the radical ideas I explored in
Abundance are now commonplace, e.g. scaffolds/layouts, smart objects, and
standard libraries for business logic. Abundance still runs circles around
modern languages such as Java when it comes to terseness.

See http://mindprod.com/article.html for an overview.

NASA told me they cannibalised it for use in onboard unmanned space craft
missions.

Abundance was written for DOS. I still write applications in it today that run
in a DOS box on Windows 95, 98 or NT.  They are not GUI, but I can knock them
out in a half hour what would take months in other languages.

There are no installation instruction, and no tutorials. There is plenty of
reference documentation however.  I have not distributed this publicly since
1986. I discarded the original tutorials ecause the language had evolved beyond
them. I also discarded the floppy based install, and never saw the need to redo
it for the Internet.

You are on your own.  However, there is some extremely good code in there to be
mined including the source for the BBL 32 bit forth compiler which runs just as
fast as the fastest 16 bit compiler.  This contains some of the most finely
tuned 8086 code ever written.

Also includes ORGASM, the floating point assembler, and SPASM a post fix
assembler.

There is a very simple name and address application included in the directory
JPW.

There is an application library in GEN useful for writing mostly applications
for charities.

Much of the documentation is in old versions of MSWord.  I think I have
gradually updated the important stuff to Office 97 standards, but you may find
some using even older versions.

You will find Abundance a strange mixture of the antique and futuristic.

The ideas really need to be reimplemented in with infix syntax, based on the
Java JVM, using GUIs, but with Abundance's passion for terseness, at the expense
of flexibility.  You do EVERYTHING in a standard way in ALL apps. If you change
that way, ALL apps change.

As an intermediate project someone might like to take on: convert the docs to
HTML, and by that I mean maintainable HTML, not that crap MS word generates, and
write some tutorials.

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