It should be completely possible using only the official install media, then and now. To do this today, download the AMD64 install74.img (like an ISO, but for flash media), write the image to a USB disk, connect to the APU1/2 via serial, plug in the drive and power up the APU, then follow the installation script.
Once booted, run fw_update and syspatch to make sure the firmware and system is up-to-date.
I published a couple of books with the following tools, which I found satisfying:
- Emacs org mode for writing
- Adobe Illustrator for the figures
- Adobe Indesign (text exported from org to IDML via pandoc) for the layout
- Amazon KDP + Ingram spark (aka lightning source) for publishing and distribution.
Be honest about what you are or aren't able to do by yourself. Publishing a book requires a wide gamut of competences: writing, editing, typesetting, graphic design, etc.
Another idea of BASIC is that the language should be similar to english. To this day, I am not sure it is a really good idea, because while it appears "easy" on the surface, you actually have to memorize the specific syntax of each command (e.g. FOR, or the punctuation in PRINT).
Most other mainstream languages (C, javascript, java, rust, etc) seems to have settled on some semi-common syntax of the same ancestry so that it is "easy" to learn once you know another of the same kind.
Lisp, on the other side... You have to learn a different paradigm initially, which some find hard and/or irritating, but then, everything is so wonderfully regular.
> Another idea of BASIC is that the language should be similar to english.
I am not so sure of that. BASIC has direct ancestry in Algol and Fortran, but it's also informed by COBOL, which appeared 5 years earlier. COBOL goes much further to be English-like, with its
ADD foo TO bar GIVING baz
... syntax. It is my impression that BASIC's design intentionally avoided that, going for something a bit more terse and efficient yet still readable.
> Most other mainstream languages...
I think that's an artefact of commercial success.
Pascal and the whole large, wide-ranging Pascal family, from Euclid to Ada, doesn't. Forth and Postscript and HP calculators and the world of RPN don't. Mathematica and things don't. Classic MacOS had AppleScript which doesn't, and that persists in OS X. APL didn't. Windows straddles a line with both C ancestry but also BASIC, VB, VBA, VB.NET, PowerShell and a bunch of other stuff that's not very C-like at all.
And, as you say, Lisp is a whole other world unto itself.
There's prefix notation with a family of languages, postfix notation which is another family, and infix, which is a huge family of which the curly-braces language are a subset but by far not the only subset.
It looks like that from one position, embedded in the xNix world, but it's not a valid generalisation, no.
> global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework
Perhaps it’s because I am an European, but I’m really astonished by the widespread diffusion of this kind of obtuse ideological furore in the US lately, especially in the academic world
Output of SVG in actual print can be quite unpredictable. Of course, I'd stick to a particular implementation, and just aim for it to come out right. Should be pretty simple.
Back when XML was the only way to go, there was a page-description language built on top. And it ultimately generates... PDF!
XSL-FO was a good idea, but it never went anywhere. Processors were costly and underfeatured, HTML+CSS ran circles around it. IIRC, XSL-FO didn't even have floats for a long time!
It's a pity that there appears to be little interest for page-oriented features of CSS: breaks, headers, footers, numbering, etc. Most don't work well or at all.
D&D never made 100% sense, but it has flavor, probably just because of that. AD&D (1st edition) in particular was a vast collection of bizarre and picturesque things which were a disaster design-wise but which we still remember fondly to this day.
(I am in the EU btw. No one I know ever considered it "a joke").
