by serendipidity (was searching a tool I needed for dosbox work) I stumbled into an .zip of advsys in one of my many 90s shareware .iso; as I never leave no stone unturned, i digged in that .zip and unearthed what appears to be a lost early version of advsys’s object.adi library, named basic.adi, dated:
; This is the simple runtime package
; by David Betz
; January 11, 1985
predating object.adi by at least half a year (the timestamp in the archive is january 11, 1986, so I can’t exclude a typo ab initio in the source comment)
; This is the object-oriented runtime package
; by David Betz
; July 19, 1986
and is much smaller (9448 bytes with CR+LF pair vs. 12,513 bytes with LF only), and at a first, cursory, analysis, seems lacking some features of the later object.adi, but not few routines are identical to the ones in object.adi; this allow me to provisionally catalog this artifact as an early version of objects.adi, and a quick search in the IF archive shows that this file seems absent from the advsys archives. Hence my tentative classification as “previously unknown early version of object.adi”.
For now, I put the artifact here for peer reviewing, if my classification is correct, I’ll upload in the IF archive, for preservation.
BASIC.ADI.txt (9.2 KB)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.