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Notes on F-PC Part #2 ******** Earlier notes may be found in the file NOTES ******** ------------------ Version 2.15 09/22/88 13:33:19.98 ----------------- 09/26/88 11:00:58.45 157. Save screen enhancement --- I have generalized SAVESCR to use a value SVMAX in allocating the space for the save screen stack. You can now change this value from the default 3 to any value between 1 and 8 to control the number of saved screen you can nestably save and restore. The utilities in F-PC need a value of at least 3 to function properly. You must also of course save and restart F-PC after changing SVMAX to cause it to take effect. WARNING of side effect --- Change number 160 below allows the use of larger screens up to 132 columns by 43 lines with F-PC. When lerger screens are used, then the amount of memory saved for each SAVESCR is correspondingly larger. The memory needed bye SAVESCR is allocated all at one time at system startup The total amount of space needed is "(COLS * 2) * ROWS * SVMAX" this total must be less than 65000 bytes of save and restore screen will not function properly. With a screen of 132x44 you may not have more than 5 nested levels of screen save. 10/01/88 16:41:04.21 158. Added system utility REF --- Received some stuff from Jerry Shifrin of the Easc Coast Forth Board. One of the thing I received was a file called REF.SEQ by Leon Dent which was supposed to show you where a word is used. It was written to run on one of my earlier Forth's. I have modified it to run on F-PC and added a couple of ALIAS words XREF and USEDIN for convenience. 10/03/88 16:51:32.67 159. NUMBER enhancement --- Smartend NUMBER to recognize ^G as a Control-G. Number now can recognize 'f' as ASCII-F, ^M as Control-M, and $10 as a HEX number equivelant to 16 decimal. 10/04/88 14:05:56.97 160. Screen handling enhancement --- I have added VALUE's for ROWS and COLS to use when manipulating the screen. These values are initialized from DOS's low memory variables as initialized by an EGA or VGA board. The result is F-PC will use as many lines as your display has when using an EGA or VGA board. This has been tested on a VGA display with up to 43 line by 132 columns. A MONO or CGA board does not initialize the low memory variables, so the display will default to 25 lines for those boards. The primary result of this is that you should use ROWS-1 as the last line of the display use "0 ROWS 1- AT" rather than a literal value, as in "0 24 AT". It turns out to be VERY IMPORTANT that a program NOT SET the video mode when starting up. If you do, then EGA and VGA displays automatically switch out of their high resolution display modes back to 80x25. So DARK, for example, must not be defined to set the video mode. Instead it simply clears the display memory directly. Another challenge was getting direct display memory writes to work in 132 column mode. ------------------ Version 2.20 10/04/88 17:05:45.82 ----------------- 10/06/88 15:42:18.70 161. Menu enhancement --- I have expanded the HELP menu to include entry items for each help screen. This makes help much more usable since you can look up the subject on the menu bar without having to actually go into HELP and look through the entry screen. 162. Menu enhancement --- Added MACRO items the the ADVANCED menu. These menu items are only there to jog your memory, if you try to execute one of them by walking down the menu, you will get told to use the ALT key sequence. 163. SED/Z enhancement --- The Z editor which is included with this system is in fact the same identical editor built into SED. The SED editor has an entry point called (as you would expect) "SED". If you type SED <filename> <linenumber> <column> <enter> as the Forth command level, you will start editing <filename> at line <linenumber> and column <column>. The Z editor can also accept these parameters at the DOS command line. This means you can now extract SED and use the spawn shell command to start up Z with the appropriate command line parameters to edit a file if needed without having Z or SED in F-PC all the time. 10/07/88 15:01:51.05 164. Esoteric BUG fix --- Under the following circumstances the debugger gets disabled automatically: debugging a word which calls $SYS or any word that ultimately called SET_VECTORS. SET_VECTORS restores the interup vectors for Control_Break, and also restored the contents of NEXT. This last part causes the debugger to be disabled and you will never return to the debugger from an above described word. Words which fall into this catagory include: DIR DEL SYS or any word that uses <EXEC> SET_VECTORS has been adjusted so it can be told not to restore NEXT by setting the VALUE RESTNEXT to FALSE. You need not do this manually as RESTNEXT is automatically set FALSE by any word that calls the debugger. It is also set TRUE by the assemby COLD code at startup. 10/07/88 17:50:34.81 165. Optimization --- Recoded LARGEST and @REL>ABS in assembly. LARGEST is used in WORDS, and the new REF word. Re-coding it in assembly improved the performance of REF about 3 to 1 in looking for occurances of words. @REL>ABS is used in the decompiler, and effects the speed of decompiling which effects debugger screen update and so was deemed worthy of optimization. 10/09/88 17:17:05.09 166. Bug fix --- repaired a bug in INVERT-SCREEN, it had not gotten updated to properly invert the entire screen if the screen was larger than 80x25. 167. Macros enhancement --- A variable has been changed to a VALUE, called ?DOINGMAC and placed in UTILS.SEQ. This word can be used to determine if we are currently in the middle of doing a macro. This is useful in reducing unneeded screen display operations thus improving performance while doing a macro. The only operations that are currently taking advantage of this information is Alt-O-A the enter any character operation in the editor, which will not display its character box when a macro is executed that was written to select a graphics character from the graphics box. This is I agree minimal usage, but I think in concept this functionality is useful. The ?DOINGMAC word is a VALUE that returns TRUE if we are in the middle of doing a macro, or FALSE otherwise. 10/14/88 13:40:49.76 168. Editor enhancement --- Add a Zoom window command to SED, Alt-S_Z switches between the current window and a full screen window. 169. Spawn DOS shell bug --- Repaired a bug in the spawn DOS shell command in the editor. SED was placing you back on the LAST line of your edit file when it returned from DOS, rather than restoring the current edit line. This was not obvious since I was saving and restoring the screen, and everything LOOKED OK. FIXXED. 10/15/88 19:04:09.28 170. Cursor shape cleanup --- I have found out how to control the cursor size on EGA & VGA boards, and have modified F-PC to consistantly set the cursor size properly for all of the display boards I have access to (CGA, MDA, EGA, & VGA). A new VALUE CROWS has been added to VIDEO.SEQ which holds the number of DOT ROWS to be used on the current display, 8 for CGA, 14 for MDA, and EGA/VGA depend on the video mode and the contents of location $40:$85. NO MORE CURSOR DISAPPEARING !!. F-PC now is able to deal with large displays in a reasonable way. The system has VALUE's which hold the number of screen character rows "ROWS", the number of screen columns "COLS", and the number of cursor dot rows "CROWS". These values allow you to create applications that will work on computers with varying screen sizes. 171. BUG fix in SORT --- Found that SORT lines in SED was not allocating enough space for one of it's buffers, and would consequently cause a crash if you try to sort. The buffer was only one (1) byte TOO SHORT. 10/17/88 21:07:34.83 172. BUG fix --- When using FPRINT, F-PC would seemingly at random times decide not to print files if it found the printer off line at the moment it wanted to start printing a new file. This has been fixed. FPRINT now only checks for the printer being off line at the very beginning of an FPRINT, and disregards it later on. ------------------ Version 2.21 10/17/88 21:10:45.26 ----------------- 10/23/88 16:23:59.96 173. Editor enhancement --- Added word and character case conversion toggles to the Option and Advanced menus. Alt-O_W toggles a word between lowercase and UPPERCASE. Alt-O_C toggles a character between lowercase and UPPERCASE. 174. Small change --- Moved PRINT.SEQ into the F-PC system. Also enhanced PRINT.SEQ somewhat so it can be used in a program, to redirect printing easily to a printer. 175. Bug fix --- Corrected a bug in PRINTING.SEQ, it was always sending the printer attribute reset codes for BOLD OFF, UNDERLINE OFF, etc. at the start of each line printed. This probably didn't hurt anything, but became obvious when I tried to edit a file I had created with PFILE, and it contained all of those ESC commands at the start of every line. 10/23/88 18:17:39.67 176. SED printing enhancement --- Added print to a file to the printing menu of SED. Just press S while in the print menu, and you will be allowed to SET the print device of file. 10/24/88 10:48:31.25 177. Nice addition --- Received a nice utility today from Bill Muench. A modified version of the disassembler that prints in PREFIX mode rather than POSTFIX. It has been placed in the CURLEY.ARC file. It is now easy to disassemble to a file with PFILE, and then modify and reload the assembly code for a slightly different purpose. 10/26/88 15:18:24.05 178. BUG fix --- I modified MENUS.SEQ, and didn't recompile the system to find I needed to change F-PC.SEQ also, consequently the system would not EXTEND. FIXXED. 179. Minor enhancement --- Adjusted SMARK in the editor so an F3-mark will not display the mark set message if it is executed in a macro. 180 BUG fix --- Corrected PASTE in the editor, it was inserting an extra blank line at the end of each paste. 10/26/88 22:43:51.24 181. MENU enhancement --- I have done some more cleanup in menus, they now no longer require the number of lines to be entered in the line where the menu is defined. The function list has been moved to LIST space out of code space, and the number of lines is determined automatically. This 7 is no longer needed, the number of lines is calculated | automatically. | | Menu title | | | | Menu text Menu line functions v v | | 7 newmenu dfile$ v v menuline" New file " makefile menuline" Open file " openfile menuline" Edit current file " editafile menuline" ────────────────────" noop menuline" Dos Shell " do-dos menuline" ────────────────────" noop menuline" Print Current file " dolisting endmenu This makes menus even easier for an application to define, you don't have to worry about getting the count wrong. 10/27/88 14:22:50.40 182. WORDS BUGFIX & enhancement --- Decided to fix the bug in WORDS that was causing words not containing the specified character to be displayed. I fixxed this bug, and added the enhancement to WORDS to allow TWO STRINGS to follow WORDS, which will cause only those words containing both strings to be displayed. Example: WORDS > @ <enter> will display only words containing both the @ and the >. You need not give both strings, but you can. You CANNOT of course include only one parameter, and then follow on the same command line with more forth commands. SEE also note 187 on the BUG FIX for SEARCH. 10/28/88 08:48:08.71 183. I have received some complaints that the F-PC kernel is TOO TIGHT. Meaning there is no room for further additions. I have moved the CODE section of the meta compiler out of the dictionary, and into its own segment. This new segment is just under 64k. It needs to be this large because the X and Y segments are moved into the CODE segment before the save is done. This does not NEED to be done, but would have taken me longer to fix, so I didn't. Sooo, There is now about 37k bytes available for further kernel expansion, and 46k bytes available for the symbol table used by the meta compiler. This should be enough for a while. By the way the system will run in under 300k, but to meta compile you need about 425k. 184. OFF>, ON> +!> INCR> DECR> enhancement --- I received some complaints about these words not being available from the keyboard at command level. I have corrected this, and they can now be used at the keyboard. 185. Added USED, and .USED enhancement --- These words can easily be used to measure the space used to compile a program or segment. They are used as follows: USED FLOAD filename <enter> or !USED FLOAD filename .USED <enter> ------------------ Version 2.22 10/29/88 14:08:24.17 ----------------- 10/31/88 12:11:12.01 186. BUG fix in WORDS --- Thanks to Leon Dent for pointing it out, and Gene Czarcinski for fixing the bug in WORDS that made it display VALUEs when requesting CONSTANTs. 10/31/88 14:34:40.92 187. BUG fix in SEARCH --- Thanks to Bill McCarthy for pointing out the bug in SEARCH, his fix almost does the trick, but one other attribute of SEARCH is that it should return a TRUE for found if the string being searched for is of length zero (0). A simple addition to the beginning of SEARCH allows for this condition. 188. COLORIZER enhancement --- Modified and add Leon Dent's COLORIZE utility. I generalized the implimentation a bit to allow it to be loaded as one file. Now you will get various colors when you use SEE, WEORDS or DEBUG. Use COLORIZEOFF to disable it. It is automatically disabled on a monocrome display. 10/31/88 17:35:27.33 189. BUG fix in MARK EMPTY --- Someone pointed out to me that MARK words like EMPTY did not always move the LIST space back to their mark point. This was caused by the dumbness of MARK, and has been corrected. 11/01/88 22:19:07.04 190. MAKE GEORGE HAWKINS HAPPIER --- Not happy, just happiER. I have added BEHEAD.SEQ into the system, and it is even ACTIVE. This saves about 700 heads, and about 9000 bytes of head space. The system has about 1750 words now, down from almost 2500. I obtained a fixed version of BEHEAD from George's LOWBROW which I still can't make work, (BUT IT SOUNDS VERY INTERESTING), and installed it into F-PC. See George's BEHEAD.SEQ file for notes on how to use it in your own files. I have added an EXTENDA.BAT and an F-PCALL.SEQ to make it easy for novices to re-extend the system to get all of the heads back. This will no doubt seem silly to you senior folk, but there will probably be at least one novice that will appreceiate it. 191. MAKE GEORGE HAWKINS EVEN HAPIER --- I have added George's ASSEMBLER jump labels, and local label mechanism to PASM.SEQ. This may cause problems for me later, since I am still waiting on the 80286 extensions to come in, but I believe the integration of those changes will be fairly simple. George's Local labels are it turns out different in a major way from the local labels I was using before. Here is the difference: George's local labels can only be used WITHIN ONE CODE word. That is lables are cleared at the start of a CODE word, and verified at the end of a CODE word. The previous implimentation of local labels, allowed labels to cross the bounds of code words as long as they were within the 128 byte range of the branch. And as such REQUIRED that the user manually reset the labels with CLEAR_LABLES. George's new mechanism is fine for most peoples needs, but NOT for all. Specifically Robert Smith's Floating point package uses this "ACROSS CODE LABELS", and as such would not work under George's original implimentation. The solution turns out to be fairly simple, I have added two words to F-PC, which switch between local only references, and global references, with the default to be LOCAL ONLY. The words are LOCAL_REF, and GLOBAL_REF. You will probably never need to worry about these, local labels are normally used only within a single CODE word. 11/02/88 15:41:44.38 192. Made FIND a defered word --- George Hawkins needed FIND to be a defered word, and now it is. 11/02/88 23:50:50.79 193. BUG fix in "HEADER --- George Hawkins found a bug in "HEADER, that was preventing it from working properly in the upper 32k of HEAD space. It was using a MIN which is signed, in a place where an un-signed MIN was needed. I have added UMIN to the kernel to deal with this problem, and I have added UMAX to be consistancy. 194. BUG fix in KERNEL2.SEQ --- I found a bug introduced by the move of CODE out of CODE space in the meta compiler, into a seperate segment. There was an ERASE in KERNEL2.SEQ that was subsequently erasing the real CODE space rather than the target CODE space. FIXXED. ------------------ Version 2.23 11/02/88 23:55:21.30 ----------------- 11/03/88 18:27:16.33 195. I have added a LOADABLE utility to the system for sorting paragraphs. The file is called PARSORT.SEQ, and when it is loaded it REPLACES the "Sort Paragraph Lines function" which is invoked with F7 or ESC-A-S. This new function sorts the paragraphs by looking at the first 8 characters of the first line of each paragraph, and sorting them until the file end is reached, or a key is pressed on the keyboard. This was written to assist me in creating the new GLOSSARY of F-PC. 11/04/88 16:11:42.31 196. BUG fix --- Discovered a bug in KERNEL1.SEQ, The definition of PAUSE was supposed to be: CODE PAUSE NOP NOP NOP NEXT END-CODE Unfortunately the NOP instructions were exchanged with the Forth NOOP word, which of course compiles nothing. So PAUSE was actually only a NEXT. Fortunately this was not a SERIOUS problem, as NEXT is INLINE in the kernel. so there was infact space for MULTASK to patch into PAUSE. FIXXED. 197. AUTOSAVE added to editor --- The editor will now automatically save your changes after 10 minutes of keyboard in-activity. Some people tend to leave the keybaord and do other things while in an edit, this improves your data security in the case where someone walks up and turns off your computer, or a power failure occurs. For those of you who want to control this automatic saving, I have added the words AUTOSAVEOFF and AUTOSAVEON in the FORTH vocabulary. If you want to set the automatic save to a different time, use the VALUE AUTOSAVE-MINUTES in the EDITOR vocabulary. As I mentioned before it is set to 10 for 10 minutes. The following sequence will set AUTOSAVE-MINUTES to 20 minutes: 20 =: AUTOSAVE-MINUTES 11/05/88 17:02:30.23 198. Line join cleanup --- Minor cleanup in the join line commands of the editor. When pressing backspace at the beginning of a line and thus joining a line to a blank line, SED no longer inserts a blank at the beginning of the line. And when using forward delete to force a following line to join with the current line, SED will only insert a space (to maintains seperate words) if the character just before the current column is NOT blank. 199. SED Goto enhancement --- Added Goto NEXT and PREVIOUS paragraph to a generalized GOTO menu Alt-G which now contains goto PAGE, LINE, NEXT paragraph, and paragraph BEFORE. There have been several times I wanted to make a macro where I needed a next paragraph command and didn't have one. 11/06/88 23:57:39.16 200. ADD the GLOSSARY --- Finished the first pass on an alphabetized GLOSSARY for F-PC's FORTH vocabulary. It contains arount 1000 entries and consists of about 170k of text. Only a few inner words have been excluded. 11/07/88 10:09:47.40 201. Enhance REF --- REF now looks at both normal and USER DEFERed words for references to the requested word. 11/07/88 14:33:07.71 202. BUG FIX in FLOAD --- I was modifying FLOAD to allow loading a file from within a COLON definition, and found a bug in the way FLOAD was preserving the previous compile state. FLOAD has always only worked if one fload was placed on a line, if two were placed on one line, the second one would be ignored. This problem was caused by my not understanding the nested load process fully, suffice to say the correct solution is to preserve the file pointer to the beginning of the line, and on coming back from an fload, reread the entire line from the previous file, resetting >IN to its original offset into the line when the fload occured. You can now put more than one FLOAD on a line, and the second one will even be done! With this bug fix also comes a factoring of FLOAD, adding the new word $FLOAD which takes a counted string, and loads the specified filename. 203. BUG FIX printing --- Fixed a bug in the PRINTING.SEQ that was causing the footer to wrap around to the next line if the left margin was increased above two on an 80 column printer. 11/09/88 15:17:41.87 204. Cleanup --- Deleted +S, from the assembler, it was not used anywhere, and has no use. 11/09/88 17:06:36.13 205. Control Structure enhancement --- I received a modified set of control structures from Bill Muench, the changes are VERY VERY minor, but result in a SIGNIFICANT INCREASE in versatility. The change is effectively to move a 2SWAP from the beginning of REPEAT and put it at the end of UNTIL. Some additional words have also been added to take advantage of the increased versatility. The changes have been added to the SYSTEM, the META COMPILER, and the ASSEMBLER. Here are some comments sent to me by Bill. Some possible combinations: DO ... WHILE ... WHILE ... LOOP ... ELSE UNDO ... \ drop or use index and limit THEN ... ELSE UNDO ... \ drop or use index and limit THEN BEGIN ... WHILE ... \ normal structure REPEAT BEGIN ... IF ... \ now branch back to begin CONTINUE ... \ otherwise, conditionally branch UNTIL BEGIN ... WHILE ... \ multiple exit tests UNTIL ... ELSE ... \ and possibly different action THEN BEGIN ... WHILE ... \ multiple exit tests WHILE ... \ multiple exit tests UNTIL ... ELSE ... \ and possibly different action THEN ... ELSE ... \ and possibly different action THEN BEGIN ... AFT ... THEN ... \ ? test first WHILE ... REPEAT FOR ... WHILE ... \ in effect an immediate ?leave NEXT ... ELSE ... R> ( DROP ) \ drop or use the loop index THEN FOR ... AFT ... \ this is not executed the first time thru the loop THEN ... \ this is executed every time NEXT Another way to exclude the n=0 case and also have the loop execute n times, but is longer and slower specifically on a FORTH machine like the NC4000 or Harris RTX. ( n ) ?DUP IF 1- FOR ... NEXT ... THEN ... IF ... BREAK \ case like structure ... IF ... BREAK \ break compiles an exit ... IF ... EXIT THEN \ same as break 206. The GLOSSARY file F-PCGLOS.TXT includes a section at the beginning containing a word list by category, to make it easier to locate a word for a particular operation. 11/10/88 14:52:53.77 207. Bug fix --- The Join Line command in SED would sometimes crash if you tried to join lines to build 130+ character lines. This has been fixed. Join line and Split line also added to the menu bar. 208. SED enhancement --- Added automatic right margin set available with a flag. This was done primarily for the Z editor, so it could set the right margin to the proper value for a document when loading it. The VALUE's name is RMSET? in the EDITOR. It defaults to FALSE (don't set right margin) in F-PC and TRUE (auto set right margin) in the Z editor. ------------------ Version 2.24 11/11/88 10:31:46.44 ----------------- 11/12/88 10:43:46.46 209. Information message cleanup --- Ajusted the INFO.SEQ file such that it will cause the F-PC.MSG file to be re-created during an EXTEND.BAT if the file does not exist. This eliminates the need for a switching mechanism to force rebuilding the message file when a message changes. All you have to do is delete the existing message file and a new one will automatically be built. 11/12/88 17:45:24.59 210. Added "CREATE --- Per George's Hawkins request in the latest BROWSER he sent, I have added the "CREATE word back into the kernel. 11/15/88 15:18:12.02 211. Did some clean-up on the system, it is now possible to load F-PC without the editor and still have FLOOK available. Some people complained that FLOOK was too closely tied to the editor. It has been decoupled, there is in fact a flag in F-PC.SEQ you can change the state of that will cause a system to be built without the editor. It will save you 35k or so, but I chalenge you to find an editor that will provide the same functionality as SED in so little space. You can aslo of course reduce the size of SED by not loading some of the editor extension files. 11/21/88 12:53:22.97 212. Enhanced the Spawn DOS Shell command from SED --- You can now pass a command line to DOS with the ESC-F-D command in the editor, you will be asked for a command to perform, and the command line will be sent to DOS. A short cut for this function is Ctrl-<enter>. An additional short cut is available with Shift-Ctrl-<enter> which will issue the same command to DOS as was last entered into the command line. This is especially useful if you are using SED as a shell for a compiler, where you want to issue the same command over and over as edit changes are made. You will need to save your changes to disk with Ctrl-U before re-compiling, of the compiler won't be able to find your changed files since SED is a memory based editor. ---------------------- Released to FORML 11/21/88 -------------------- 11/23/88 12:43:45.43 213. Added HEADERSOFF and HEADERSON to meta compiler --- A few words have been made headerless with the above words, there were some words in the kernel that I did not want accessable in the system, and they have been removed. Small space savings. 214. Enchanced TOLINE- & TOLINE+ in SED --- These words allow moving to a particular line very quickly, and a portion has been coded in assembly in the word ADJ-PTR-LINES, which adjusts a line pointer table line range by a value. This improved the performance of moving from the beginning of a large file to the end, by about 40 percent. No space cost. 215. Corrected confusing error messages --- I have corrected the confusing error messages associated with #IF, COMMENT:, and .COMMENT:. These words were generating a "Use ONLY while compiling" error message that made it hard to determine what the real error was. Each word now has an error message signifying that the appropriate closing word was not used. Here is an example: "COMMENT: missing a COMMENT;". ------------------ Version 2.25 11/29/88 13:41:12.12 -----------------