new program: chastearg

I wrote a small program for both Linux and DOS assembly. It is very easy to explain what it does with some pictures. The first picture is what it looks like when I use the Linux version on my Debian system. The second is the DOS version running under the DOSBOX emulator.

As you can see, the words surrounded by quotes are displayed on the same line because they count as one argument. Linux handles this by default but DOS needed some help. I had to rewrite my entire argument filter for the DOS version.

The reason I wrote this project and worked to make it consistent for both DOS and Linux is because I wanted to do an upgrade to the DOS version of chastext. As you can see from the picture below, I have succeeded!

When I first posted about my chastext project, some people said it was useless because we can already use sed for Linux or other tools for find and replace. However, my assembly versions are simpler and faster than sed when you don’t need regular expressions. They also don’t depend on anything other than interrupt calls of the operating system.

But more importantly, their argument is stupid. Writing similar programs to existing programs is a great programming exercise and is especially important for tiny projects where I don’t want to implement all the features of a program or its dependencies. I can also bring the program to platforms that the original program does not support, such as DOS.

This attitude some people have is one that I don’t like. Should I not sing just because Taylor Swift can sing better than me? Should I not play the piano just because other people can do it better than me? Or should I not play Chess just because I can’t do it as well as Magnus Carlsen or a chess engine?

I started programming for the joy of learning and writing me own things. I often reinvent the wheel such as how I wrote my own strlen and strcmp functions for my chastext project. I don’t have access to the C standard library with the way I am doing it. I can’t imagine criticizing someone else’s programming project just because it has features to a similar tool that may exist. Otherwise, I would be saying Linus Torvalds should not have created Linux just because Unix and Minix existed which had similar file systems.