CroftSoft / People / David

Old Code


The following code is available under the terms of the Academic Free License v3.0.

I've been writing code as a hobby and professionally since I was 12-years-old (1980) in a number of different programming languages. Of all of those, there were 4 that I fell in love with enough to to build my personal libraries in. In order as the years went by, they are Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Ada, and now Java.

I am now completely sold on Java now as I find it to be the most highly evolved in a natural progression. I never plan to go back to any of these other languages, as good as they were, so feel free to browse through the links to my old personal source code libraries if you think you can learn from them.

In light of the rapid advances of Java, the history of wcCODE bears special mention. Before Java, wcCODE was the only way to write portable, online, multi-user bytecode for the online community that I found accessible. Just as Java code is propagated in portable bytecode .class files, wcCODE was installed as a Bulletin Board System (BBS) extension in the form of a bytecode .wcx file. This proprietary programming language derived from BASIC for the Wildcat! BBS software allowed the programmer to seamlessly integrate new code without having to worry about serial I/O. Before wcCODE, one had to write and integrate RS-232 serial communications code or go through software that would redirect your standard i/o to the modem. Of course, wcCODE would only run on Wildcat! BBS software and you could typically only reach an local audience of modem/BBS fans. Thank God for Java.

Absent from this list is the C programming language. While I have written about 30,000 lines of C code in my professional career, the software engineering principles ingrained in me from my years of Pascal and, especially, Ada programming convinced me that I should build my personal libraries in programming languages that could scale up to large, multi-programmer projects. Whereas the Ada programming language was designed from the start with robust software design issues in mind and included the native multithreading support I needed for multi-user online applications, it lacked the communications facilities that I required to reach the online community. Fortunately now, with Java, I can have my cake and eat it too.

David Wallace Croft
1997-11-30

2001-11-15

Before I reorganized my Open Source Java code library under the com.croftsoft package hierarchy, it was distributed via ORBS.com. I have provided a snapshot of that code in an old code Java subdirectory. This code is licensed under the terms of the MIT-style or MPL Open Source licenses as stated at the head of each source code file.

I authored some of the code in the ORBS archive while in the employ of Analytic Services, Inc. (ANSER). ANSER management was kind enough to release this code to the public under the terms of an MIT-style Open Source license at my request. To prevent confusion with regard to copyright issues, the ANSER code is archived separately here and is no longer distributed with the main CroftSoft Code Library.

 
 
 
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