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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : New version of MMBasic (ver 4.3)
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Nick Guru  Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 512 |
There are only 3 instances where RENUMBER is useful. 1) Tidying up my program listings so that the numbers flowed sequentialy in even increments. 2) When one needs to insert more lines of code within a program and needs to create space between two existing line numbers. 3) Typing in or running some old program that was written with line numbers. That's it. All programming on the MM is otherwise done with no line numbers and does not need RENUMBER. Personally, I don't care if it is removed or not. If I don't need it, I don't use it. Someone else may find it useful or need it for some task (convert old software) so it would be useful for their purposes. That's the beauty of MMBASIC... it's flexible. Nick |
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bigmik Guru Joined: 20/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2914 |
I for one would mourn it, but I fear I am in the minority here... Mick Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<< |
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boss Senior Member  Joined: 19/08/2011 Location: CanadaPosts: 268 |
Hi, I remember these early 80's days when we had a Wang computer in our lab, we wrote programs in unique BASIC dialect and the RENUMBER command totaly screwed our work many times. |
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| paceman Guru Joined: 07/10/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1329 |
Wouldn't worry me - but unless people are running into memory problems routinely that can be fixed by removing it, why bother? Geoff has the best handle on when he needs to free up some memory - I'd leave that entirely to him. |
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James_From_Canb Senior Member Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
An alternative: Use the Renumber.bas program that Geoff wrote for the original library to renumber the code. I recall someone mentioned it had dropped out of the latest library, but if it could be updated with all the new keywords there would be little need to keep the function as part of the editor. It remember that program as an example of really tidy coding. It should be easy to update. James My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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| Nick Guru Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 512 |
I'm confused. Is the RENUMBER function causing problems? Nick |
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| James_From_Canb Senior Member Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
Not that I know of. It's more a question of whether it's still used. The question was raised by Ratall My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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| boss Senior Member Joined: 19/08/2011 Location: CanadaPosts: 268 |
Hi Nick, yes, here is one example I can recall from my memory, to be situation even more precarious the errors appeared pure randomly, so you renumbered programm succesfuly 10 times and the this appeared: Before After 100 rem 100 rem 111 ..... 110 ...... 222 ..... 120....... 333 ..... 130....... 444 GOSUB 3333 140 GOSUB 3333 . . . END 3333 rem subroutine 500 rem subroutine |
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| Nick Guru Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 512 |
I recall in an earlier version of MMBASIC (before the ability to have no line numbers), RENUMBER had a bug that I mentioned to Geoff who, as always, promptly fixed and I was able to renumber my program with a nice and tidy line increment of 10. It worked fine for me thereafter. Now, I don't need it at all but it doesn't bother me that it's still there. You never know, I may one day want to type in the Star Trek game as listed in the well known book by David H Ahl's "Basic Computer Games". What's a computer without a classic Star Trek game!! 
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djuqa Guru Joined: 23/11/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 447 |
Nick If you rewrite it, I will play it VK4MU MicroController Units |
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| shoebuckle Senior Member Joined: 21/01/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 189 |
Yes, Renumber.bas was removed from the User Program Library as it was out of date. If anyone wants to have a go at bringing it up to date, I can send you a copy. Just PM me with your email address. Cheers, Hugh |
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| ratall Newbie  Joined: 27/11/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 12 |
HI All I made the post about the renumber and edit to start a conversation. So here I will clarify. I noticed that Geoff is constantly adding to the functionallity of the Maximite.(and doing a great job)but everything has a cost. I also know it is human nature to hang on to things you are familiar with often long after they have stop being usefull. If Geoff knows what people value and what they do not. When the time inevitable comes when he has to make the choice between adding a wanted feature and sacrificing a current feature or not adding that feature at all, knowing what people value will make the choice easier. My main point with the renumber is its fairly large piece of code that could be easly handle by a utility written in BASIC. (interestingly writing such a utilitly used to be a fairly standard piece of coursework for students at one time ). Suggesting the Full screen edit "may not be the best use of memory" I thought would get conversation moving better than just talking about the renumber. If you look at the device as a stand alone computer the full screen editor is great. If you look at it as a quick and easy way to delevelop home projects that interfave with the real world you may feel a libary of device handlers is a better use of memory than a full screen editor. If you use it as an educational device you probably want a bit of everything. (the next 2 paragraphs are just me showing my age, skip them if you want they are not that relevant) When I started out in working in computing we used paper tape. The big advance of the time was punched cards. Many of the more experinced programmers refused point blank to use them saying it was too easy to shuffle(quite literally) for one thing and there were too many holes making them hard to read etc etc. Sequence numbers (line numbers) on the cards were essential, but editing was a breese remove a card re-punch and insert in the right place, paper tape not so easy. For many years after paper-tape went out of favour there were computers that would not boot with out a papertape reader attached. Why? becuase the companies spent a lot off time hardcoding the paper-tape reader in (prior to that you enter the bootstrap papertape reader code via switches) and knowbody told them that the only thing read off of paper-tape was the card reader driver. Also I suspect,people did not want to lose something they lobbied so hard to get just because they didn't use it anymore. Somebody suggested not removing code because controllers are getting bigger/faster and cheaper all the time. This approach leads to big ugly impossible to maintain code. Double the code size, quadruple the potental for errors(just look at Windows). Also Geoff is not Microsoft he doesn't have hundreds of people sitting around to maintian code almost nobody uses. When I asked Geoff about making interupts persistant over chains he quite rightly pointed out very few people would require it and it just was not worth it. That got me thinking about what was already there. If it's not used I presonally think it should go' particularly if there is a viable alternate like renumber.bas. I like the Maximite its fun. Lets keep it fun for Geoff too, don't make him maintain code nobody uses, give him room to move. Tell him know what you use and what you don't. not just what you want. So in that vane. I think I will put another couple of question out there. Just for fun. If you could have any feature added to the maximite but you had to loss some other features in order to get it. What would want and why? 
and of course What would you be willing to lose to get it? 
and just so Geoff doesn't get depressed What do you think is the best feature of the maximite and why? 
R. Nick I am afraid you miss read me. What I was saying was removing the full screen edit would be getting away from 80s style computers. Just wanted to clarify some times I am not as clear as I would like to be. |
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| Nick Guru Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 512 |
If Geoff has run out of space to add to MMBASIC and needs to recover some memory then yes, RENUMBER could go. If there isn't a problem, why touch it? I'm sure Geoff has better things to do.
Personally, I think we should give Geoff a break. He's spent a lot of time providing us with the Maximite and MMBASIC, added and expanded it as per our wishes.
It's time we stopped asking for more and start using what's been given to us. MMBASIC is quite powerful now. Let's go forth and create applications to make our Maximite useful, productive, educational and fun. Nick |
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9307 |
ratall makes good points. nick makes equally good points. Having read ratall's post, and was going to start posting what I would like to see in the MM at the expense of other functions etc, then I read nick's post right below it, and it put things in perspective. nick is right IMHO, and certainly no disrespect to ratall for his comments. I have often thought to myself since the original MM was published in SC, what a great toy this thing is, and was amazed at what it could do even in B/W. I often wondered how many thousands of lines of code Geoff had written to create the MMBASIC firmware - I speculate it was quite a few...  Unfortunately at the time, it lacked serial IO, decent sound and colour video.
Then along came the colour MM which fixed the colour and decent sound wishes. Actually, the serial IO was fixed in a firmware update for the original MM. Once those three things were satisfied, I just HAD to play around with it seriously, as I was up till that time, using PICAXE and several external modules to do the same thing that the MM does all in one package. No disrespect to the PICAXE - I still use these too, but for more advanced projects where you need sound and video, the MM wins hands down now, especially as it is now in colour. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| shoebuckle Senior Member Joined: 21/01/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 189 |
I agree with ratall and nick and as far as I am concerned, Renumber can go but please keep the Editor as I use it all of the time. James-from Canb is going to have a go at bringing RENUMBER.BAS up to date for those who still like to use numbered lines. Personally, I cannot abide them, but it takes all kinds to make a world. A huge thanks to Geoff for the Maximite in all its incarnations. May he rest upon his laurels for a while. He deserves it. Cheers, Hugh |
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| Nick Guru Joined: 09/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 512 |
I agree with the replies above. No disrespect to ratall at all. We have a lot of talented people here each from different programming backgrounds. Geoff has done an amazing job to accommodate everyone and we need to respect the fact that what seems worthless to one person is a needed feature for another. Anyone who has looked at my code in "Donut Dilemma" will see that I'm from the old-school world of BASIC programming. Yet, I have now embraced no line numbers, I'm starting to use Do-while loops and I'm using less heavily condensed multi-statement lines. The point is, I could still do everything the "old way", it didn't prevent me from achieving what I needed to do. At the same time, I'm learning to embrace the modern way of coding. MMBASIC supports both these programming styles and that's a credit to Geoff. I, as someone who has written 2 of the largest programs for the Maximite to date (correct me if I'm wrong), I haven't really encountered memory limitations. I did in MaxMan for awhile so I asked Geoff to include the command LOADBMP. Donut Dilemma uses this command to achieve a game with 10 different levels, title pages and high score pages with colour graphics and yet it has plenty of spare RAM left over to include at least another 10 levels. www.maximite.net.au Nick |
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| ratall Newbie Joined: 27/11/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 12 |
Hi Geoff Sorry to bug you. But I think I've found a small bug t$ = Left$(Mid$(ProgLine$,10),instr(ProgLine$,"(")) causes an error Error: Expected closing bracket t$ = Left$(Mid$(ProgLine$,10),instr(ProgLine$,")")) causes an error Error: Invalid syntax these however are excepted with out error t$ = Left$(Mid$(ProgLine$,10),instr(ProgLine$,Char$(40))) t$ = Left$(Mid$(ProgLine$,10),instr(ProgLine$,Char$(41))) t$ = Left$(Mid$(ProgLine$,10),instr(ProgLine$," ")) and so most interestingly is this t$ = Left$(Mid$(ProgLine$,10),instr(ProgLine$,"("))) It looks like the interperter is counting the braces in the string or I can't count (very possible) There is a simple work round so its not urgent. but it is confusing if you don't spot it. thanks R. |
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| James_From_Canb Senior Member Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
I've rewritten RENUMBER.BAS so: . it is less like assembler and more like structured Basic. . it is case insensitive. It doesn't matter if you write GOTO or GoTo or goto. . it handles programs that have a mix of lines with and without line numbers. . it aligns the start of the code to the longest linenumber. Now your code all starts on the same column - no more dogleg between lines 90 and 100. . it ignores line numbers in comments. ** (see note below about single quotes) . it is based on the structure of lines - it recognises multiple statements separated by colons, and comments. . it checks that line numbers are all in order, and there are no duplicates. . it warns if it finds any occurences of "rem " which the program uses as a flag that the following text is a remark. It's not perfect yet. It probably never will be. For example, I can see a problem if a line like 10 IF X$ = "'" THEN GOTO 200
exists, because everything after the single quote will be processed as a remark, and the GOTO 200 will not be updated correctly.
Also, I haven't implemented the code for a Start line in the input file yet, so it isn't a replacement for the current internal MMBasic operation yet. However, it's getting close. Would anyone like to test the code and let me know if they find any problems or have any suggestions? Standard warning though: If you test it using a program that's important to you, back up your program first, and don't let my program anywhere near the backup! 2013-01-30_061412_RENUMBER.zip James My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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| MOBI Guru Joined: 02/12/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 819 |
Hi James, I wonder, can it handle e.g. print "goto" etc? will the "goto/gosub" be recognised as an occurrence of goto/gosub? David M. |
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| James_From_Canb Senior Member Joined: 19/06/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 265 |
David, Print "Goto 100" will have problems. Good pickup. Thanks. Maybe I can treat text within double quotes like a remark - trim it out while I process everything else, then put it back together again. I'll think about it. James My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention. Hedley Lamarr, Blazing Saddles (1974) |
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