Package Details: opencomal 0.2.6-1

Git Clone URL: https://aur.archlinux.org/opencomal.git (read-only, click to copy)
Package Base: opencomal
Description: OpenCOMAL - a free Comal implementation
Upstream URL: https://github.com/ProphetPX/opencomal
Keywords: 1970s 1980s basic c128 c64 comal comal80 delphi dev pascal programming
Licenses: GPL
Submitter: ProphetPX
Maintainer: ProphetPX
Last Packager: ProphetPX
Votes: 0
Popularity: 0.000000
First Submitted: 2026-06-08 10:26 (UTC)
Last Updated: 2026-06-11 23:26 (UTC)

Dependencies (6)

Required by (0)

Sources (1)

Latest Comments

ProphetPX commented on 2026-06-10 23:14 (UTC)

As of June 9th 2026, i found out:
The original author of OpenComal, Jos Visser, has since updated his own codebase and made substantial and many many new improvements to his own code that are maybe UNRELATED to my own efforts here: go find his own github here: https://github.com/josvisser66/opencomal AND here: https://www.josvisser.nl/opencomal/

ProphetPX commented on 2026-06-09 18:30 (UTC)

WE (Google Gemini AI, and I) seem to have fixed all earlier bugs. Code is working wonderfully as of today! The build # scaled back to 590 from way way above 611 (I think i was in the 660s by then), because of various weird git time machine shenanigans, but i got the working codebase back and it feels free of all prior bugs and looks beautiful.

ProphetPX commented on 2026-06-09 02:50 (UTC)

There is currently (builds 607-611) a line input bug in terminals with the current build, and so, sorry i do not know Ocaml or termcap info to fix this. Maybe someone else can help as i have already ran out of my initial CoPilot AI credits while trying to fix the input/parser/no output bug.

ProphetPX commented on 2026-06-08 23:32 (UTC) (edited on 2026-06-08 23:33 (UTC) by ProphetPX)

This is from my Github repo https://github.com/ProphetPX/opencomal , since i cannot find where else to put this intro text at, here on AUR? This is my first time here.

OpenCOMAL

This is a slightly patched version of Jos Visser's OpenComal 0.2.6 (stable branch). FAQ Why this fork?

When trying to run the latest stable or instable OpenComal on more or less recent versions of Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 10.04), the included Linux binaries opencomal and opencomalrun immediately crashed on startup. For me, they only worked on ancient Ubuntu 6.06. Simply re-compiling the sources did not help, so I tracked down the problem and fixed it in the C sources.

So after 3 or 5 years of being unavailable on new Linux distributions, the year 2012 starts with the return of COMAL, the much improved, PASCAL-flavoured dialect of the (in)famous BASIC programming language. Does Jos Visser, the original author, endorse this fork?

I don't know. He did not answer my e-mail. Legally there should not be any problem because OpenComal is licensed under the GPL. I do not see a new line number after entering auto. Is this wrong?

Never mind, just type anything, and it will appear. Or hit the backspace key first (kudos to Harald Arnesen for this hint). When will you implement feature X?

I will not. As far as I am concerned, OpenCOMAL is just a fun retrocomputing project that allows you to run old COMAL code on Linux systems without requiring an emulator, and to find out how programming felt like in the seventies or eighties of the previous century. Having said that, I will consider pull requests that come with a nice description and readable code. Further Reading included:

original README
original TODO
original documentation

external:

Børge R. Christensen's COMAL Reference Guide (for COMAL 0.14 on the C-64)
Wikipedia has useful COMAL entries in German, English, and Polish.

ProphetPX commented on 2026-06-08 10:30 (UTC)

Claude CLine AI agent in VSCode did all the heavy lifting of fixing the very very old codebase from 2002. I did zero to nothin' in minutes flat.