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Editor?

Posted: Wed 16 Sep, 2009 10:37 pm
by bwang
What happened to that plain-text editor app from the first post in the Progress Thread? It seems like a nice way to edit BBC Basic programs in a way that feels more like the TI-BASIC editor.
Also, is there a way to check whether a file of a certain name exists?

Re: Editor?

Posted: Wed 16 Sep, 2009 10:47 pm
by benryves
It was scrapped for space reasons, unfortunately, and I don't have the time to write a new one at the moment. To be properly useful it would need to tokenise/detokenise BBC BASIC programs, which is a laborious and painful job in Z80 assembly, too. :(

As for detecting whether a file exists; OPENIN"FILENAME" will return 0 if no file was found.

Re: Editor?

Posted: Wed 16 Sep, 2009 11:55 pm
by builderboy
Bwang has a point. Everybody I've talked to about BBC Basic is all for it and very enthusiastic until they find out how the editor works. It seems to be a major turn away factor :(

On a side note, are programs stored as tokens or characters?

Re: Editor?

Posted: Thu 17 Sep, 2009 1:12 am
by benryves
Tokenised. The program format and tokens are documented in the, well, documentation (and the C# editor implements a tokeniser/detokeniser that may be useful as a reference).

The line-based editing is common to old microcomputer BASICs, but I acknowledge that people expect a bit more these days. :| Personally, I write larger programs on the PC first, only writing small programs on the calculator.

Re: Editor?

Posted: Thu 17 Sep, 2009 2:47 am
by bwang
Isn't there a BBC Basic star command that reads a text file (*LOADTEXT)?
As for writing programs on the PC, I know several people who dislike programming calculators on anything but a calculator. Part of the attractiveness of calculator programming is that they are portable.

Re: Editor?

Posted: Mon 21 Sep, 2009 10:01 pm
by bwang
Ben:
If you still have the original text editor app, could you release the app and/or the source? That may, perhaps someone else could write the tokenizer.
Would it be feasible to write the tokenizer in BBC Basic?

Re: Editor?

Posted: Mon 21 Sep, 2009 10:35 pm
by benryves
bwang wrote:Ben:
If you still have the original text editor app, could you release the app and/or the source? That may, perhaps someone else could write the tokenizer.
I don't have it, sorry, and it would be entirely possible to write the tokeniser in BBC BASIC. You could always try writing a converter from something like Document DE.