Back in 1987 I wrote a BASICODE translator for the QL which included lots
of hardware-dependent code, including a cassette device driver for use
with
the network ports. It had to be run from EPROM because of necessary exact
timing (after all the network port is an ordinary bit-banging interface).
Also, it used the SuperBASIC vectors $12C through $13A which are hardly
documented (I used the code for the TK2 'ed' command as documentation).
This software runs on Minerva but NOT on SMSQ/E.
I have plans to put it on GitHub as it might still be useful since a lot
of
BASICODE programs have been put on GitHub recently. Moreover, I'm planning
a new release which doesn't depend on original QL hardware. There's no
need
for using cassette interfaces now ;-) but you will still need to convert
the BASICODE programs in ASCII form to SuperBasic. The old code achieved
this by loading the program directly into SuperBASIC (using the
'undocumented' vectors) but this doesn't appear to work on SBASIC, so the
new code will write the translated BASICODE as an ordinary S*BASIC program
which you can LOAD or MERGE...
Apart from the obvious historical interest of BASICODE and the sofware you
wrote, it would be useful to document vectors etc concerning editing basic
programs and syntax checking. And if you have gone as far as to do a
commented disassembly of the TK2 ED command, for example, that might be very
useful too. For example, comparing the code in SMSQ/E might help show the
differences and where common code could be used too if the structure of
SuperBASIC and SBASIC is not too different.
The reason this springs to mind was that on the QL Forum online chat last
night, we were discussing Tim Swenson's SSB (Structured SuperBasic system).
While it's a nice, simple little development system for BASIC programmers,
one thing it doesn't do is check syntax.
Dare I say it (I can live in hope) that such documentation might one day
help us get some form off IDE (a development environment) for better Basic
program development. ED and even using a text editor is absolutely fine, but
when it comes to developing the larger BASIC programs I do sometimes feel we
are in need of some form of integrated development environment. OK, I'll
accept that probably if I'm talking in terms of such major programming
effort, I'm probably using the wrong language in the first place, but hey,
if the information is there, let's keep it and use it.
Dilwyn
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