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----------- ACE history ----------- 2/3/92 - Version 1.0 released to testers. 13/3/92 - Numerous bug fixes: - parameters were being corrupted in some complex recursive calls (see ackermann.b). - array referencing with float index in INPUT was corrupting the input value. - narrator library was being expunged after every SAY command -- now only expunged once at the end of the program. 14/3/92 - Above fixes released to testers. 22/3/92 - 27/3/92 - Added block comments {...}. - Added forward SUB declarations. - Made ALL shared variables call-by-reference. - Local SUB string duplication bug fixed (same BSS object name being given to numerous strings in different subprograms). - Re-released to testers. 4/4/92 - Fixed relational string operators >,<,>=,<= so that proper lexicographical comparisons are made. Even though = and <> worked fine before, these have also been modified. All now use a more efficient C-style _strcmp function. 5/4/92 - Update sent to testers. 7/4/92 - Maximum duration for SOUND (in db.lib) changed to 999 from 77 to accomodate large sound samples (see play.b for an example). 21/4/92 - Sequential files simplified: EOF no longer looks for EOF character (ASCII 28), it just tries to seek past the current position returning a seek error if it can't (ie: EOF reached). 22/4/92 - Made CLS 1.3 and 2.04 compatible (in db.lib). - Added logical shift functions [SHL(n,m),SHR(n,m)]. - Added turtle graphics XCOR and YCOR functions. - Fixed long integer SUB bug: when calling a long SUB with bsr, A68K spat the dummy when it saw a '&' (eg: bsr TEST&). All '&'s replaced by '@'s. - Added Ctrl-C trapping to compiler. Partly works. - Fixed HEADING so it's always non-negative. 2/5/92 - 8/5/92 - Added screens, PALETTE, PAINT, SYSTEM, DATE$. - Made CIRCLE rendering faster by using DrawEllipse() if full 360 degree ellipse is requested. - Updated ace.doc and noted that SADD is not required for string constants (ie: it's optional). 12/5/92 - Incorporated command line arguments [argcount,arg$]. 16/5/92 - Added single precision MOD. - Fixed OCT$ which was giving incorrect results for high values. Now only handles positive LONGs. - Added BIN$. Like OCT$, n=abs(n) [n is LONG]. - Added FRE(n), with extras (see ace.doc). - Added POTX(n) and POTY(n), where n=0 or 1. 17/5/92 - Fixed bug in _deletewindow (db.s): Contents of location zero was being moved into window lists instead of #0 (!). 6/6/92 - Fixed RIGHT$ bug: was returning the NULL string when requested sub-string length equalled string length. - Modified MOUSE(1) and MOUSE(2) code to work when an ACE screen is active. 8/6/92 - Added WorkBench startup capability. - Added REPEAT...UNTIL loop construct ala Pascal - Added CASE...END CASE construct. - Added DAY function. 9/6/92 - Added two compiler options: (i) Ctrl-C break trapping. (ii) Optimisation (peephole). 11/6/92 - Added definable numeric constants. - Incorporated a BORDERLESS window for each user-defined screen to facilitate IDCMP events. - INKEY$ can now be used to read keystrokes from a user-defined screen's window. - Fixed RAW: window routine bug. The same Wdw-id was unwittingly being allowed to be used for more than one window creation. 12/6/92 - Modified CLS to work with user-defined screens. 13/6/92 - 14/6/92 - Incorporated external variables and functions (C, assembler...). 28/6/92 - Modified LOCATE to work with user-defined screens. - Fixed exponentiation so that it always returns a float, in case of a negative exponent. 29/6/92 - Incorporated full 32-bit math. ACE is now Wb 2.0 *reliant* (due to use of utility.library): (i) 32-bit division replaced 32-bit \ 16-bit. (ii) 32-bit MOD replaced 32-bit MOD 16-bit. (iii) Multiplication: - 16 x 16 bit integer (new). - 32 x 32 bit integer (new). - float x float. (iv) Array index calculations now use 32-bit unsigned multiplication. This fixes the bug that disallowed absolute indexes of greater than 65535. - Fixed yet another bug in INPUT: string array input was producing pointers which all lead to one string. - Defined numeric constants can now be signed. 30/6/92 - Added LOF(n) function. - Modified WAVE statement so that size of waveform table can be up to 131070 bytes (hardware limitation). - Fixed CHR$ bug: LONG parameters weren't being coerced to SHORT. 2/7/92 - Added the CSTR function. 3/7/92 - Added the HANDLE(n) function. - split db.s into db.s and turtle.s due to link problems: Blink or ACE programs GURU when db.lib too big. 4/7/92 - Added optional variable declarations. - Wrote a simple pre-processor for ACE: app, to allow include files. 7/7/92 - Added event trapping: BREAK,MOUSE,TIMER(n). - MENU event trapping not yet complete since menus themselves have to be implemented. - Added CSRLIN and POS for screens only so far. - Changed over from SetSignal() to CheckSignal() for ctrl-c -b compiler option and BREAK event trapping. 16/7/92 - Added: (i) ADDRESS option for DIM. (ii) SIZE option for STRING. (iii) increment and decrement operators. (iv) indirection operators: @,*%,*&,*!. 17/7/92 - 19/7/92 - Improved efficiency of strings and string arrays. The modifications also allow strings and string arrays to be passed by reference. 20/7/92 - Modified LOCATE, POS and CSRLIN so they take account of the current font (in ScreenMode). - Improved PRINTS so that it behaves in almost the same way as PRINT. 28/7/92 - Added SIZEOF function. - Fixed a long-standing bug that caused GURUs during parameter passing when a context-switch occurred, corrupting the stack. This is a short-term fix only, and will be replaced by use of C-style parameter passing. 8/8/92 - 9/8/92 - Added structures. - Modified VARPTR to handle structures. 6/12/92 - Divided main linked library into functional modules which are joined to produce db.lib. The code from db2.lib and turtle.lib has been incorporated into db.lib. 6/12/92 - 7/12/92 - Further modularised compiler source files. I could *really* use a make utility now! 8/12/92 - Changed SHR and SHL code generation from lsr.l and lsl.l to asr.l and asl.l respectively, in order to handle shifts of negative numbers correctly! (oops) 12/12/92 - 13/12/92 - Improved PAINT. Too much RAM was being reserved. 12/12/92 - 13/12/92 - Added AREA, AREAFILL, PATTERN. 13/12/92 - Added SCROLL, SPACE$. - Fixed bug in PAINT: border color not being reset. 21/12/92 - Improved LOF by using Seek() rather than Examine() to find file length. This removed the need to use the 2.04 function DupLockFromFH() making LOF 1.3 compatible. - Reverted to SetSignal() from CheckSignal() to preserve 1.3 compatibility. 22/12/92 - Replaced 32-bit integer math routines in utility.library with lmath.a routines from Sozobon's ZC.lib. This obviates the need for the 2.04 utility.library making all ACE integer math 1.3 compatible. The lmath.a module has been incorporated into db.lib, with slight modifications (source is called lmath.s). - Brought DIM in line with AmigaBASIC. If a dimension is specified as N, the resulting subscript range is 0..N, rather than 0..N-1 (as it is in C and was in ACE up until now). - Removed reference to ACElibs: from libfunc.c, so this no longer has to be ASSIGNed in the user-startup or startup-sequence script. 26/12/92 - Added support for Workbench arguments in the form of an include file (WBarg.h). 27/12/92 - Modified APP so that an include file is only ever included once per program. APP now also handles single and multi-line comments ("'" and {..}). 28/12/92 - 29/12/92 - Fixed some long-standing little bugs in the lexical analyser. - Moved the code for comments from the parser to the lexical analyser. - Added the rest of AmigaBASIC's reserved words for completeness and because I may get around to implementing some things that I didn't originally think I would. - Changed the lexical analyser's reserved word search method from sequential to binary. This has resulted in a dramatic improvement in compilation speed (around twice as fast as before). I should have done this a long time ago. - Added code to prevent APP from looking for comments inside string literals! - Removed ++ and -- operators from factor() because they are confusing (IMHO). Pre-increment (++) and pre-decrement (--) can now only be applied to variables, not as part of an expression. 30/12/92 - Added STRING$ and INSTR. 1/1/93 - Added descriptions for ALL functions and commands in ref.doc since some people using ACE won't have the AmigaBASIC manual. 5/1/93 - 6/1/93 - Work on sequential files: - CLOSE can be used to close more than one file now, but at least one filenumber still has to be specified. - Added LINE INPUT #filenumber,string-variable. - Added INPUT$(X,[#]filenumber) and ditched INP$. - Improved performance of all sequential file functions in db.lib. - Made file format produced by WRITE identical to AmigaBASIC. - Added PRINT #filenumber,expression-list. - Added INPUT#filenumber,variable-list. - ACE files are now very nearly identical to AmigaBASIC. 12/1/93 - Fixed a bug in VAL that was causing numbers with more than 8 decimal places to give weird results. - In considering the use of double-precision math in ACE, I have realised that Motorola FFP values can handle up to 8 decimal places of accuracy, whereas in AmigaBASIC, a number with >= 7 decimal places is classed as a double-precision value. Given the degradation in accuracy which occurs when more than 8 digits (counting both sides of the decimal point) are specified in an ACE FFP value, AmigaBASIC's double-precision convention will probably be followed in ACE. - Increased the size of the buffer for INPUT$ from MAXSTRINGSIZE to MAXSTRINGSIZE*32 (32K currently) to facilitate the reading of longer files. - Made all library functions which impose a limit upon the number of characters in a string or buffer use MAXSTRINGSIZE-1 (changed string.s and file.s). 13/1/93 - Stopped a large memory leak when ACE quits due to an internal list memory allocation error. There still seems to be a small leak however. - Modified the bas script so that intermediate files are deleted after each stage of the compile- assemble-link process. This frees up more RAM. 19/1/93 - Fixed a bug in the lexical analyser which was returning a value of 1 for ANY number of the form nnE[+|-]mm when mm was 0. 20/1/93 - AREA was only allowing 19 points, not 20. Fixed this. 21/1/93 - Fixed a weird AREAFILL and PAINT bug. Both of these routines allocate and initialise a temporary rastport for area/flood filling. Although the memory was being freed, the TmpRas pointer was not zero'd. On the next call to PRINTS or Text() a GURU 8100 000C resulted (recoverable alert under 2.04). It appears that Text() or some lower-level graphics primitive tries to use an existing TmpRas if one seems to exist. After making Rp->TmpRas=NULL the bug disappeared. 26/1/93 - Modified APP so that lines taken up by block comments are represented by line-feeds in the destination file so as to prevent line mismatches between the latter and the source file. This still doesn't get around the problem of line mismatches caused by #include directives though. 31/1/93 - Changed effect of DEFDBL and <ident># so that they yield single-precision data types rather than double-precision. This avoids any problems further down the line (because double-precision is not yet supported). 2/2/93 - Added ctrl-c user break trapping to APP and improved the reliability of ACE's ctrl-c trapping. 4/2/93 - ACE v1.0 released to the public! First started work on ACE in October 1991. ******************************************************************************* 6/2/93 - Work on ACE v1.01 commenced. - Improved compile-time error handling. Now, the whole offending line is displayed and a carat marks the place in the line where the error was identified. The rest of that line is then ignored so as to prevent further spurious errors. More work remains to be done for this revision on this. - The observation was made that AmigaBASIC does NOT evaluate exponentiation operations from right to left as previously thought, but from left to right as with all other operations. This obviates the need to change ACE's exponentiation evaluation method. - AmigaBASIC does not allow a term of the form: n^-m or n^(-m). ACE allows the latter but not the former. 7/2/93 - Fixed INPUT from RAW: windows so that the destructive backspace key actually erases text as it does in a CON: window. The routine was also cleaned up in general and made more efficient. - Sequential file OPEN modes can now be upper or lower case (ie: "I" or "i" etc). 11/2/93 - Fixed the FOR loop index bug by not allowing a shared variable to be used as the index. - Trailing characters (other than '&') can now be used to coerce one numeric literal to another. Note that & and % have the same effect as CLNG and CINT in ACE (ie: they _always_ round up). 12/2/93 - String literals now need not have an end quote. Such a string will be truncated at the end of the line. - Fixed bug in LINE INPUT# whereby the variable's data type was not correctly established if the variable was declared with STRING. - LINE INPUT# was also modified to accept a string array as well as a simple string variable. 13/2/93 - BASIC line numbers have been implemented for backward compatibility with old BASIC programs and for consistency with AmigaBASIC. 14/2/93 - Fixed a bug in STRUCT..END STRUCT & CASE..END CASE where blank lines caused spurious compilation errors. - Changed a hard-coded X:Y screen ratio constant in the turtle graphics section of db.lib to a data item which can be accessed/modified with ACE's EXTERNAL directive (EXTERNAL _tg_xy_ratio). - Made several compile-time errors "cleaner". 15/2/93 - Improved error handling for undeclared arrays. - Fixed a bug in INPUT#. It was crashing when the file wasn't open or the file number was invalid. - Rewrote VAL code in C. It now handles fixed-point and exponential format single-precision values as well as decimal, octal and hexadecimal integers. 16/2/93 - Rewrote _short_from_string and _long_from_string in C. These routines are used by INPUT and INPUT# to extract integer values from strings. Decimal, octal and hexadecimal values may now be handled via INPUT and INPUT#. 18/2/93 - Rewrote _strsingle which is used by PRINT#, WRITE#, PRINTS and STR$ so that it produces fixed-point and exponential format single-precision output. PRINT also uses this routine now. The new version of _strsingle (written in C) is somewhat faster than the original which was badly coded in assembler. A single-precision number is converted to the form: -|+.mmmmmmmmE-|+nn by fpa(). If 7 <= nn < -6 the number is displayed in exponential format. - Added a FIX command (see ref.doc for details) which alters the number of decimal places a FFP value is rounded to. 19/2/93 - Replaced _round routine in db.lib. This is used by by CINT and CLNG and wherever a float needs to be rounded to an integer. The new version seems to be faster than the old one which used fpa() and arnd(). The former only uses mathffp.library functions. 20/2/93 - ACE v1.01 released. ******************************************************************************* 28/2/93 - Work on ACE v1.02 commenced. - Added a compiler switch (-i) which makes an icon for the executable just created by ACE. - Added ON <event-specifier> GOTO. This is in addition to ON <event-specifier> GOSUB which was already implemented. - Changed all bsr and bra 68000 instructions to jsr and jmp respectively in order to avoid the 32K displacement limit. Moreover, some beq instructions have been replaced by a combination of bne and jmp to avoid this limit. This included changes to the code for: IF, CASE, REPEAT..UNTIL, WHILE..WEND. - Fixed a bug whereby return code in d0 was being overwritten before the program ended, due to calls to cleanup routines. 1/3/93 - Changed all occurrences of bsr in db.lib and startup.lib sources to jsr so as to avoid the 32K limit mentioned above (28/2/93). - Implemented KILL and NAME. - ON..GOTO and ON..GOSUB implemented. 6/3/93 - 10/3/93 - Rewrote SAY command in C and added support for mode-array(7) and mode-array(8) such that ACE SAY now allows for asynchronous speech. - Moreover, a SAY(n) function has been added, where SAY(0) returns -1 or 0 to indicate whether there is active asynchronous speech, SAY(1) returns the mouth width and SAY(2) returns the mouth height corresponding to the phoneme being spoken. 14/3/93 - Added support for SAY mode-array element #6. This allows for 12 different audio channel allocation combinations as per AmigaBASIC. See ref.doc for more. - Improved performance of INSTR function by only checking first character of target string against each character in the source string until they match. At this point a full sub-string comparison is carried out. 12/4/93 - Fixed a bug in shared library function declaration code in which a search for a non-existent function sometimes caused the compiler to hang. The routine responsible was rewritten with a resultant speedup. 13/4/93 - Fixed a bug which had been lurking for some time, related to string variable assignments. A string variable not declared with the STRING command was not always being associated with a storage area. In fact, only the first occurrence of the string was being so associated. If this first occurrence was in a CASE or IF statement, it might never be reached with the consequence that the string in question was associated with a random address in memory! This is now fixed, so that each time the string is assigned a value, it is bound to its correct address. Obvious in hindsight. 15/4/93 - Commodore Australia have given me permission to include the .bmap files in the ACE archive. I don't have this in writing yet though. ConvertFD can not be distributed however, so a completely new (functionally equivalent) program will have to be written. 16/4/93 - 17/4/93 - A couple of bugs which were related to the above string bug (13/4/93) were fixed because they were missed at the time and resulted in complaints from A68K (legitimate ones) about unknown symbols. - Testing has shown that a plethora of problems of previously unknown origin were related to the string bugs described above. Also, Michael Zielinski has reported that there are no longer any Enforcer hits from ACE now after the fixes from 13/4/93. 18/4/93 - ACE v1.02 released. ******************************************************************************* 9/5/93 - Work on ACE recommenced. - ARG$(0) added for access to a CLI command's name. 11/5/93 - CHDIR command implemented. 18/5/93 - 21/5/93 - Enhanced FILES command implemented. 30/5/93 - A few string functions (ARG$,SPACE$,STRING$,UCASE$) were using a single buffer for each result which was being overwritten during evaluation of an expression such as: UCASE$(..) = UCASE$(..) This was fixed by creating a temporary string for each function call as with other string functions. - * INPUT$ still uses a single 32K buffer however! * 6/6/93 - Command line argument handling routines completely rewritten in C. This fixed an infrequent bug in which the last argument wasn't always being parsed and enabled the correct parsing of quoted arguments. - Added two new compiler switches: -E and -c. The first creates a file called ace.err which contains all the compile-time errors at the end of an ACE run. The second includes each ACE source code line as a comment in the assembly source code. 7/6/93 - A bug in exec.library version checking was preventing CLS from correctly changing the background colour after a COLOR command on machines higher than V37 (ie: Wb 3.0 machines like the A1200). This is now fixed. 10/6/93 - Fixed a bug in which CLOSE was sometimes causing a privilege violation processor trap. DOSBase wasn't always being moved to a6 prior to calling the dos.library Close function (!). 12/6/93 - Added ptr_term() function between expterm() and factor() in expression parser to correct the precedence of !%, !& and !* operators. - I have decided to leave SUB parameters as they are for now. See ace.doc Subprograms section for latest details. - Added SLEEP command. So far only works when in screen mode. 13/6/93 - Fixed a bug in which insymbol() was being called one too many times by the "@" code when the address of a structure member was being found. - Added code to address_of_object() (used by @ and VARPTR) to find the address of an array element. This code - and therefore @ and VARPTR - can now find the address of: - simple variables - external variables - arrays - array elements - structures - structure members - Added a -l compiler switch which displays each ACE program source line before it is compiled. - Implemented SWAP command ala AmigaBASIC. It swaps simple and external variables, array elements, structures or structure members. 14/6/93 - Modified the handling of string value parameters so that association with BSS storage occurs at the start of subprogram execution rather than waiting for an assignment. This fixes the address for the life of the parameter. One consequence of this is that VARPTR and @ correctly access the address of the formal parameter, not the actual parameter. This also ensures the correct handling of such parameters by the SWAP command. 19/6/93 - Modified address_of_object() so that when the address of a structure variable is requested with @ or VARPTR, the address of the variable in the stack frame is returned, rather than the start address of the structure. The latter can still be obtained by simply referencing the variable (eg: x = mystructvar). The modification makes variable structure parameters possible (see ace.doc "Structures" for an example). 20/6/93 - Made structures sharable with the SHARED statement. - SUB parameters may now be preceded by SHORTINT, LONGINT,SINGLE or STRING to indicate data type rather than always having to use %,&,! or $. - String array elements can now have a specifiable size via a new SIZE option in DIM. - String variable declarations with STRING command will now accept defined constants for the SIZE option. 29/6/93 - A bug in both BIN$ and OCT$ (such that negative values were being negated) was fixed. 30/6/93 - ADDRESS data type added. This is really just an alias for LONGINT but it makes a lot more sense when viewed in the context of a variable, parameter or structure member which holds an address. - It is now possible to declare a SUB to be of a certain data type by using: LONGINT,SHORTINT etc. - Shared structures worked fine when modifying/using structure members, but not when modifying the address held by the structure variable itself. This has been fixed. 1/7/93 - ALLOC function implemented. This is a hassle-free Unix-style memory allocator which makes use of the Alloc/FreeRemember functions of Intuition. 2/7/93 - Added ASSEM..END ASSEM for inline assembly code inclusion. - OPTION <switch>+|-[,<switch>+|-..] can now be used to set compiler directives as well as being able to do so from the command line. 3/7/93 - Fixed a bug in which the type of structure members was not being correctly determined by the SWAP command such that short integer and string structure members were not being handled properly. 4/7/93 - SIZEOF now correctly returns the size of a structure variable. Prior to today, only the size of a structure definition was correctly returned. This was an oversight. 10/7/93 - ACE version 1.1a released. ******************************************************************************* 4/9/93 - Work on ACE v2.0 commenced. 4/9/93 - 12/9/93 - Flexible serial I/O support added to ACE. Up to 255 channels are supported. - ERR function added (serial errors only so far). 25/9/93 - Serial I/O routines tidied up. - ERROR trapping implemented (serial errors only so far). 26/9/93 - Buffered file I/O error codes added. These are returned by ERR and recognised by ON ERROR. 10/10/93 - TAB function now works for screens. - Implemented PTAB function. - Made PRINT command screen/window mode transparent. - This is all part of a conspiracy to make ACE able to handle Intuition and DOS windows completely transparently. Next comes INPUT transparency. 11/10/93 - Made INPUT command screen/window mode transparent! - Implemented SPC function. 24/10/93 - Extended ctrl-c break trapping to screen mode. 24/10/93 - 25/10/93 - Intuition windows implemented! ACE now allows for windows on screens! In fact, all windows except the shell/CLI are now Intuition windows in ACE. Next comes menus and gadgets... - Added WINDOW(12) and WINDOW(13) which return font width and height (respectively) for the current output window. - Screen colours are now adopted from Workbench as per AmigaBASIC. 26/10/93 - Window close event trapping implemented. Since ACE doesn't automatically handle the closing of windows when the close gadget has been clicked, a compiler switch (-w) and user-defined event trapping was deemed to be the best way to handle this. - Fixed yet another bug in CLS which was causing the print position to be incorrectly aligned in Intuition windows. 1/11/93 - ACE windows now handle certain control characters (ASCII: 7,8,9,10,12,13) in exactly the same way as AmigaBASIC, eg: CHR$(7) rings the BELL! - Implemented boolean gadgets and gadget WAITing. Next comes gadget event trapping, a gadget function, string and proportional gadgets, as well as some tidying up. 2/11/93 - Implemented GADGET(n) function and ON GADGET event trapping. 6/11/93 - Implemented String and LongInt gadgets. 7/11/93 - 8/11/93 - Implemented proportional gadgets (horizontal and vertical sliders). - Window close gadget events are now passed on for ON WINDOW or -w compiler switch trap handling. 9/11/93 - 10/11/93 - Menus have finally been implemented in ACE!! This includes menu command keys (keyboard shortcuts), MENU WAIT command, MENU event trapping and MENU(n) function. 5/12/93 - MENU and GADGET trapping/WAITing now fully supports WINDOW close-gadget handling. - WAIT GADGET 0 implemented: waits for ANY gadget. This is in my opinion, the best method of dealing with gadgets in ACE since it is very flexible and CPU-nice. It is however modal. - Fixed two bugs in the completely rewritten INPUT code: no space after "?" and no scrolling after INPUT at bottom of window. 15/12/93 - Fixed PRINT/PRINTS/PRINT# inability to accept some parameters delimited only by spaces. ACE seems to accept just about anything delimited by spaces now (or of course by commas/semicolons). - Fixed a long-standing bug in which the compiler would incorrectly parse IF .. THEN PRINT ELSE .. such that ELSE was ignored. This works fine now. 16/12/93 - 17/12/93 - Fixed BSS structure object alignment so that all such structures will be long-word aligned. - Reduced the amount of code written to the target file when internal compiler errors occur to a short skeleton program. This may yet be further minimised. - I have started the process of improving the efficiency of the compiler's memory management routines by using code similar to the ALLOC function in ACE as well as trying to reduce the size of each node in the symbol table. - The arbitrary DIM limit of 10 dimensions has been removed; 255 are now allowed as per AmigaBASIC. 17/12/93 - 18/12/93 - Memory management and efficiency improvement continues. - The compilation line number indicator has been streamlined to cut down on I/O and improve its appearance. - Memory leaks now seem to be "capped". - The arbitrary SHARED limit of 40 has been lifted. - Fixed a problem caused by editors which don't automatically append a line-feed (ASCII 10) to the end of a file, such that the last line of a program wasn't being parsed. - SERIAL OPEN randomly generating ERR=300 (OPEN_ERR). Probably caused by OpenDevice() result not being coerced from BYTE to ULONG (??). Fixed this. - Fixed a bug in which insufficient memory was being allocated to hold DIM index information. 24/12/93 - CHR$(13) now only performs a CR (in user-defined windows) as per the CON: and RAW: windows. In AmigaBASIC, CHR$(13) does the same as CHR$(10), ie: LF. - Appended ASL library stub (generated by genstubs) to ACE's ami.lib so that ASL file requesters can be used by FILEBOX$ function (see below). - Implemented MSGBOX and FILEBOX$ functions which easily allow the ACE programmer to invoke system and file requesters respectively. Thus far only the ASL file requester has been implemented. The next step is to test for the operating system version at run-time and call different file requester code for Amigas running anything less than 2.04. - Started writing the code for an IDE so that ACE can be run from the Workbench. This will be developed over the coming months, but a simple version should be working within days. 25/12/93 - Yes I know it's Xmas. It's also 1 am. So I'm a fanatic! :-). - I have *finally* found the ZC code which causes the conflict with ACE's ctrl-c trapping mechanism. Upon examination of the ZC source code, I found the culprit to be a function called Chk_Abort(). This I redefined (in misc.c of ACE's source code) to do nothing except return 0. This redefinition has also been made in app.c. - APP now uses the alloc()/free_alloc() functions for handling memory allocations. 26/12/93 - Modified ACE so that the ".b" extension can be used. This is still optional though. The main reason for doing this was to accomodate TDS's (Twilight Development System, an excellent shareware IDE) apparent need to have the extension of source files made explicit. - Fixed MsgBox so that it works correctly under Wb 1.3. The requester wasn't taking on the correct proportions. - Added support for a Wb 1.3 FILEBOX$. It requires the arp.library. I may eventually replace this with standalone code (when I get time to write a nice, simple file requester or some kind soul gives me the source for one). 27/12/93 - Implemented "SYSTEM command-string" which has the same effect as Execute(command-string,0L,stdout). - Finally got around to implementing DEF FN, as a simple variation on SUB. 28/12/93 - Optional parameter is now legal in ACE's RND function. It is currently only a dummy. - FileBox$ modified so that a single string parameter is required. This allows a title for the requester to be supplied (eg: "Open"). 2/1/94 - As promised above (see 24/12/93) I've written a simple IDE for ACE called AIDE. This is 1000 lines of ACE code and the results are fairly pleasing. The source code for this program will be included in the archive as an example of what can be done with some of ACE's more recent features. AIDE currently only runs properly under Wb 2.04 (and up). - Fixed a bug in which IF..THEN struct->member... was causing an Undeclared label error! - Changed the return values of MsgBox to -1 and 0 instead of 1 and 0 so that "OK" (or whatever the first gadget is) can be seen as a boolean TRUE. - String structure members didn't allow a named numeric constant to be given for the optional SIZE parameter, but they do now. - String array, structure member and variable declarations allowed a string of non-positive size. This has been fixed. 3/1/94 - I started out with the simple intention of adding a bit more compatibility to ACE's shared library function handling and ended up with almost total compatibility with AmigaBASIC. Only "almost" because shared library function declarations are still mandatory in ACE. That's now the only difference. The previous ACE syntax is still supported though. 4/1/94 - I have written an ACE program (autonum.b) which takes the drudgery out of maintaining the line number references to the sections in ace.doc and also adds page numbers. 5/1/94 - Implemented a SYSTEM function which returns ExecBase->libNode.lib_Version (eg: 34 = Wb 1.3). 6/1/94 - After some false starts, I've added "EXIT FOR" which provides a (read: THE) clean way of exiting from a FOR..NEXT loop in ACE. - Implemented INPUTBOX and INPUTBOX$! I took the syntax from Visual Basic's functions of the same names. ACE now has 3 standard requester types. 7/1/94 - Completed the last bits of improving the efficiency of ACE's memory allocation routines. I couldn't get it to produce any memory leaks. 8/1/94 - Well, I thought I was finished with the memory allocation stuff from yesterday, but I decided to try speeding things up some more. This I have done by decreasing the number of allocation function calls by half for the code list. I've also switched to ZC.lib's malloc() & free() which seem to be solid. - Tested ACE on an A1200 this morning. It seems fine although a "Magic Menus" commodity didn't get along too well with ACE's menus. - Just finished my standard pre-release testing run of ACE which involves compiling and running over 50 programs under Wb 2.04. A number of programs were also tested under Wb 1.3 with and without fast RAM switched on. 9/1/94 - Fixed a bug which made A68K generate syntax errors because some label names conflicted with assembly keywords (CPU register names to be specific). - In the process I found a couple more bugs: variables starting with an underscore but with no trailing type character were not being assigned a data type; DEF FN return values were not always being coerced correctly. - Everything from yesterday is now being re-tested. 10/1/94 - Fixed a bug in which ACE tried to clean up asynchronous speech when the narrator.device was not present and SAY had aborted. Sigh. Another testing run me-thinks. 12/1/94 - 13/1/94 - Peter Zielinski (Sydney) has been testing ACE the last couple of days and found a problem in which menus looked weird with some fonts. This has been fixed. - I realised that there would be a similar problem with InputBox$ and fonts other than Topaz 8. This function has been modified to handle non-topaz-8 requester title fonts, but Topaz 8 is used for the requester prompt and boolean gadget text. - Fixed a bug in which LIBRARY CLOSE (used without a specific library name) was producing incorrect library base names for libraries not on ACE's standard libraries list (ie: those opened at the start of a program run and closed at the end) resulting in an undefined label error from A68K. - Also, a library base (again, for non-ACE-listed libraries) now gets zeroed after a call to ACE's _close_library routine in case it's closed again (_close_library check for NULL). 14/1/94 - Improved menu text rendering by using the graphics library TextLength() function to get more precise widths for menu titles and items. 15/1/94 - Fixed a bug in which INPBOX[$] was growing in size (from the bottom) when called multiple times with a non-topaz font as the screen font. - Tried many things to fix a bug in which INPUTBOX[$] gadgetry display gets corrupted by _some_ fonts. - Improved INPUTBOX[$] by making the string gadget active when the requester is rendered. This means that the user doesn't have to select the string gadget before entering text into it. - Tweaked the width of menu item text highlighting. - AIDE has been steadily improved over the last week. 16/1/94 - Tested all example programs under 2.04 and 1.3 (and also with NoFastMem under 1.3). 19/1/94 - ACE version 2.0 released. ******************************************************************************* 23/1/94 - Work on ACE recommenced. - Fixed a bug in val.c: val() and long_from_string() were not skipping leading whitespace (<= ASCII 32). VAL and INPUT use these functions. So does INPUT# but it does its own whitespace skipping. I am stunned that this bug has been around since February 1993! That's when I rewrote the code from assembler (the latter DID skip leading whitespace). This is a good example of how it is still possible to overlook simple bugs no matter how much testing you do. I'm just amazed I never caught this one!! I found this bug two days after the release of version 2.0 :(. Sigh. - Added a "Run in Shell..." option to AIDE's Program menu (see AIDE.doc). This also handles command-line arguments. The "Execute..." I/O window now has a close gadget rather than prompting for the 'C' key to be pressed since the latter may fail if the command being executed fails. 24/1/94 - AIDE: Added code to properly handle multiple "Execute..." and "Run in Shell..." selections by using unique shell-startup script names. 6/2/94 - More modifications to AIDE (now v1.02). See "Changes" file in AIDE directory from now on. - Added FONT and STYLE commands to ACE. 7/2/94 - Implemented LONGINT(n) function. 8/2/94 - ACE now accepts ".bas" extensions for the sake of compatibility with GW-BASIC, HiSoft BASIC etc. AIDE and bas have been modified to handle ".bas" extensions also. 15/2/94 - Implemented MESSAGE feature which provides a simple interprocess communication facility. 16/2/94 - SCREEN FORWARD and SCREEN BACK added to ACE. 26/2/94 - Structures may now have other structures as members. To use them it is necessary to take their address (with "@" or VARPTR) and assign this address to a structure pointer of the member's type. - FILEBOX$ now has an optional second parameter: default-directory. A couple of people requested this and I agree with its utility. 27/2/94 - Added support for IFF graphic files. You can open, view and get information about picture files in ACE via three commands and a function. See ref.doc under "IFF". 28/2/94 - Weird bugs appeared in file I/O after adding the IFF module to db.lib. Excluding iff.o got rid of the problem. It remains out while I figure out the problem. I believe it to be a module/library size problem. This sort of thing has cropped up before. 6/3/94 - It was pointed out to me by Chuck Kenny that user-defined windows could be "lost" behind a screen's default window when the former are equipped with depth gadgets. Jeff Harris made me aware that this would occur if the borderless default window was not also a backdrop window. It wasn't, but now it is. :) 7/3/94 - The GADGET statement now allocates memory for each boolean gadget's text and takes a copy of it. This avoids the problem of having the text in two or more buttons changing when a single variable is used for all the buttons. I had known about this problem for some time, but recent discussions with Chuck Kenny and Kendall Sears made me take definitive action. 20/3/94 - Today I began the process of trying to reduce db.lib module sizes so as to link less non-essential code to ACE executables. An average improvement of 10K has been made thus far, per executable (eg: from 45 to 35K). - Work has been too busy of late to do any other serious work on ACE. Sigh. 3/4/94 - More work on decreasing the size of library modules and limiting dependencies between them. 4/4/94 - CLEAR ALLOC statement implemented. This command frees memory allocated by ALLOC at any time, allowing more intelligent use of ALLOC when memory is tight. - ALLOC's second parameter (mem-type) is now optional. When not specified, or when outside the range 0..5 CLEARED+PUBLIC memory is allocated. - After the modifications to db.lib and a small bug fix in the IFF library module (a file wasn't being closed), the IFF commands and function seem to be coexisting peacefully with the rest of db.lib. 5/4/94 - Fixed a bug in which calls to INPUTBOX were interfering with the correct functioning of INPUTBOX$ by keeping longint string gadget mode and buffer length in force. Peter Zielinski found this problem and reported it to me. 10/4/94 - OPEN's "A" (append) mode wasn't creating a new file if the specified file didn't exist! It only worked with files that existed. This was an incorrect interpretation on my part of what "append" mode meant in AmigaBASIC. Thanks to Peter (strikes again) Zielinski for pointing this out to me. - Added (over the last few days) some more peephole optimisation code to ACE: integer sign extension, constant negation. The former speeds up IFS significantly (went from 372 to 507 peephole removals as the result of the new optimisations). 11/4/94 - Bogus peephole removals were causing the failure of some programs. This has been fixed. 23/4/94 - Window flags were being accumulated so that the type specification of a call to the WINDOW command was affecting subsequent calls (to WINDOW). This meant that if a window was specified as having a close gadget, _all_ later windows were "inheriting" a close gadget. :( Thanks to Kenneth Brill and Sean Miller for picking this one up and reporting it. This and the 5/4/94 INPUTBOX[$] bug have taught me to be more careful with static structures and their contents. 30/4/94 - WINDOW OUTPUT was causing windows to be activated contrary to AmigaBASIC. This has been fixed. - I just realised that when no window type is specified in AmigaBASIC, the default is a type value of 31 (ie: the works). ACE has been changed to fall in line with this policy. You can still specify zero for a window to have no gadgets etc. - I just found an undocumented feature in the window module of ACE's run-time library. If a type of 32 is specified for a window, the window will be borderless! - GADGET(1) now returns 256 if the window's close gadget was clicked after doing a GADGET WAIT 0. - It was also discovered that GADGET(1) was only returning valid values for gadget-ids from 1 to 9. Sigh. This has been fixed (allows 1 to 255 now). 5/4/94 - Found and fixed two bugs related to MENU. Dan Oberlin reported that using LEFT$ in conjunction with MENU caused problems. Specifically I found that menu item strings weren't being copied (same problem as with GADGET command on 7/3/94) so that the LEFT$ buffer (one static buffer per call to LEFT$) was being used as a source for all menu items (eg. in a single menu). I also discovered much to my dismay that allocation for menu title strings (and now item strings) was not allocating memory for the end-of-string marker! Double sigh. This is probably the cause of the occasional mergings of characters in the menu bar I've observed. I'm also aware that an extra rightmost menu title appears when the Magic Menu commodity is used. Thus far I've seen nothing in the MENU code to account for this. 6/5/94 - Fixed a bug which has reared its head a number of times before but didn't seem to be repeatable or consistent. In the last week I have had 3 bug reports consistent with this kind of thing. A GURU (80000003) shows up either when the RMB is clicked numerous times in succession or when a window is closed. The first of these has been fixed by utilising info' posted to the ACE list by Kendall Sears. This was a bug fix posted to BIX by Peter Cherna some time ago concerning the fact that if the IntuiMessage's IAddress field was being dereferenced before the Class of the message was ascertained. If the class wasn't GADGETUP, the IAddress field contained garbage. If this value was a non-longword aligned address, a 68000 CPU trap was invoked. I have yet to determine whether or not the window-close type bug is also related to this kind of dereferencing. - I also took this opportunity to add a call to sleep() before the gadget waiting code. This has been in use in the menu run-time code for some time. 13/5/94 - Opening a file in RAM: for "append" was not working under Wb 1.3. I modified the code to make this work for 1.3 and above, by not using MODE_READWRITE which seems to behave differently under 1.3 and 2.04. 14/5/94-15/5/94 - Added SLEEP FOR <seconds> command. Someone asked for this recently (Tim Lewis as I recall) and I've thought about doing it for some time anyway. Why the "noise word" 'FOR'? It's easier to parse it this way (ie. disambiguation from SLEEP). 5/6/94 - Fixed a bug in which VAL was returning garbage from whitespace strings. 12/6/94 - Implemented a mechanism to allow for multi-module ACE projects and/or the creation of ACE subprogram libraries. See ace.doc for more about this feature. - Added a push/pop pair for d1-d7 and a0-a6 around external function calls so as to prevent register corruption. - Added to the syntax of DECLARE FUNCTION so that external functions can now be declared via a similar syntax to SUBs and library functions. The new syntax also allows for an external function's parameter-list to be documented. 20/6/94 - 23/6/94 - Completed work on external SUB definition and declarations. Subprograms in modules retain full functionality albeit with some specific requirements as laid out in ace.doc. 24/6/94 - 25/6/94 - Implemented a bevel-box function to give gadgets the look-and-feel of Wb 2.x/3.0. This same function will also be used to implement a command which allows ACE programmers to easily create bevel boxes. Thus far boolean & proportional gadgets have been converted. Note that GadTools library is NOT used to achieve the 3D beveled look in ACE. 25/6/94 - GADGET MOD command added which allows proportional gadgets to be modified after creation. The knob position and maximum number of positions can be changed via this command. The latter is optional. - The keywords ON and OFF may now be used instead of 1 and 0 for the "status" parameter of the GADGET command. STRING, LONGINT, POTX and POTY can be used in place of the "type" parameter in the GADGET command. In both cases, readability is improved dramatically for what is admittedly a somewhat overloaded command. A BUTTON keyword is also planned for the "type" parameter. 30/6/94 - Added string-gadget bevel-box code to bevel.c which all string gadgets now call to get the GadTools 3D look. 6/7/94 - 7/7/94 - Finished tweaking 3D look of gadgets. - Gave InputBox[$] the new 3D look. 10/7/94 - Now, if the first argument to the ACE command is "words" (must be lower-case), all reserved words for the current version of the compiler will be dumped to standard output. - BEVELBOX command implemented. - BUTTON keyword added for use in GADGET command. See entry for 25/6/94. - BUTTON gadget text now uses color-id 1 in accordance with Workbench (requester) gadgets. 12/7/94 - Event trapping is now considerably more harmonious after centralising all Intuition message handling for event trapping (eg. for menus, gadgets, keypresses). The upshot is that event trapping can be mixed in any way the programmer wishes. This is of course, as it should be. 14/7/94 - Longstanding PSET bug fixed. PSET didn't modify current output window pen position ready for next graphics operation. This is because WritePixel() alone was being used. Move() is also used now with a tiny penalty in time (~.2 seconds difference over a 10,000 pixel plot). 24/7/94 - Fixed a bug in the peephole optimiser which tried to negate things other than immediate mode numeric literals. - Fixed a bug in INPUTBOX[$] code in which an IntuiMessage field was being dereferenced in a situation in which it should not have been. This had the potential to cause a GURU, although it never did for me. - Increased buffer for string/longint gadgets to 1024 characters (including NULL). - Also fixed a bug in which the right side of string/longint gadgets had a bite taken out when selected sometimes. 24/7/94 - 26/7/94 - After finding that my last approach to improving event trapping was flawed, I had a rethink. The result was a that a lot of code was rewritten. The whole thing is now far simpler and more efficient. 28/7/94 - Fixed a bug which was introduced in version 2.0 of ACE in which CLS called ClearRaster() (instead of a console control string being executed as it is normally) for a shell window after the final user-defined screen (when no windows were opened by the program) had been closed. This resulted in the shell's borders being erased. 29/7/94 - Long-integer math routines modified to be compatible with C code which is linked to ACE programs as EXTERNAL FUNCTIONs. Some operands were previously passed in opposite order to that expected by C code (eg. n / m would have had to be coded as m / n). 3/8/94 - ASSEM..END ASSEM was behaving oddly when blank lines were present. This has been fixed. However if anything appears on the same line as "ASSEM" that whole line is included. Also, if anything appears on the same line as "END ASSEM", that whole line is omitted. 7/8/94 - Switched over to ILBM.library to get IFF commands and functions working in ACE. Need yet to allow HAM screen mode though via SCREEN command. - Fixed a (dumb) bug in which floating-point "--" function (SPSub) was not being externally referenced correctly. 10/8/94 - 11/8/94 - Added HAM and EXTRA_HALFBRITE screen modes (5,6) to ACE's SCREEN command! (Yippee! About time right?). - IFF commands/functions refined further. ACE now handles HAM pictures. If a picture doesn't display correctly when opened onto an ACE screen, simply allow ILBM.library to open its own screen & window. 13/8/94 - Fixed a bug in WINDOW OUTPUT command: if the shell was made active via this command it was still being seen as being an Intuition window. :( - Re-implemented WINDOW(0) correctly after a recent conversation with Peter Zielinski and a question from Kimmo on the ACE list. It now returns the window-id of the selected output window. 14/8/94 - Modified MsgBox so that it zero is returned if button-text1 is NULL. - Added ctrl-c break trapping to "ACE words" command. - WINDOW code was modified so that a copy of the window title text is made, for the same reason that menu and button text is copied (so it is static). 20/8/94 - Whenever a program uses IFF commands, ACE now looks in LIBS: to see whether the ILBM.library exists. If it doesn't, ACE _creates_ it, deleting it at the end of the program run. If the library already exists before the ACE program begins, it is simply used. - STYLE command extended to work in shells (console windows) as well as windows created with WINDOW. - Fixed a bug which caused some nested CASE statements to fail at assembly time. - ACE was looking at one byte too many when looking for a function name in .bmap files. Fixed this. - A WINDOW bug that gave _all_ windows a title bar was fixed. This bug was introduced unintentionally via work done on 14/8/94. 22/8/94 - Fixed a known bug in which an identifier which started with an underscore _always_ got a type of single-precision. Now an underscore can be DEFxxx'd in the same way that A..Z can. - Added MESSAGE CLEAR command: removes all messages currently queued at a message port. 24/8/94 - In recent times I had a number of reports of certain programs not working correctly on A1200s, involving the use of command line arguments. In fact, these programs (eg. FD2BMAP.b) were causing GURUs. I tracked this down to a call to AllocMem() which specified FAST RAM instead of PUBLIC RAM!!!! I have no idea why I would have done this!! The bug manifested itself when I ran NoFastMem on my A500, simulating the situation found on stock 2 Meg CHIP RAM A1200s. This has been fixed of course! 26/8/94 - 27/8/94 - GADGET command now correctly handles Screen TextFont as set in Prefs (affects BUTTON and STRING/LONGINT gadgets). 28/8/94 - Added SCREEN(4),SCREEN(5) and SCREEN(6) to return a screen's bitmap and x,y font sizes. The SCREEN function was also rewritten in C. - Changed temporary directory used by IFF READ to ram:ILBMtmp to avoid any complaints about making the assumption that T: = ram:t. - SHORTINT parameters to shared library functions are now always sign-extended to avoid the need for explicit coercion to LONGINT. - MESSAGE WAIT no longer clears a message port of all "old" messages before waiting for a new one. MESSAGE CLEAR is now the only means by which this can be done. 1/9/94 - MESSAGE READ now allocates memory for a simple buffer if necessary. - DIM and DECLARE FUNCTION may now optionally be followed by one of: SHORTINT, LONGINT, SINGLE, ADDRESS or STRING. - The formal parameter list identifiers for DECLARE FUNCTION may now optionally be preceded by one of the above type identifiers. 2/9/94 - The ALLOC function now also handles requests for MEMF_ANY. MEMF_ANY | MEMF_CLEAR has become the new default. I was prompted to do this after a recent discussion on the ACE mailing list in which it was pointed out that the use of MEMF_PUBLIC memory as the default/norm is not really correct. See RKM and Exec autodocs for more. - ACE wasn't complaining when too few array indices were given. It does now. 3/9/94 - MSGBOX is now also usable as a statement for those occasions when the return value from sysrequest() is of no interest. The statement only takes two parameters, not three. See ref.doc for more. - Removed some redundant IDCMP handling code. This resulted in an increase in run-time efficiency. I also suspect that this redundant code caused the loss of a (small but annoying) number of intuition messages. 3/9/94 - 4/9/94 - The address of external functions and subprograms can now be determined with VARPTR or the @ operator (see prgs/misc/Task for an example). 9/9/94 - ++ and -- were not always correctly handling *external* variables. They do now. - External variable/function declarations can now use type keywords: SHORTINT,LONGINT,ADDRESS, SINGLE,STRING (functions only). - Explicitly disallowed external string variables because of the danger of trying to assign a value to an external character buffer of unknown size. It is still possible to treat such a buffer as an address which can be used when declaring a string variable or with CSTR. Functions can also return pointers to strings. They also didn't work properly before. :( 10/9/94 - Occurrences of MEMF_PUBLIC changed to MEMF_ANY in all cases in compiler and library code except aceports.c (message ports). - Line continuation character ('~') implemented allowing calculations, parameter-lists etc to be spread over multiple lines. 11/9/94 - Added SERIAL(n,12) which returns the status of the port lines and registers associated with a serial channel. - ACE's "WORDS" parameter made case insensitive. - Added ERR values for opening windows and screens. - Improved peephole optimisation further. Certain redundant register moves were not being removed. In the process of doing this, the optimiser had to be tightened up in places to prevent valid code from being removed. - Fixed Turtle Graphics aspect ratio so as to correctly reflect screen mode. 17/9/94 - ON ERROR trapping works for windows and screens now. - Fixed a bug in which spaces always printed in "legal" print rows. This conflicts with SETXY'd (or PRINTs following gfx commands) print positions. 18/9/94 - Version 2.29 released to several beta testers. 1/10/94 - Fixed a bug which was introduced on the 1/9/94 such that a declaration like: DIM a(10),b(10),c$(10) caused c$() to become a single-precision array! - Fixed a bug in EXTERNAL FUNCTION which was also introduced recently (through accidental code deletion), in which the absence of a type-word (eg. SHORTINT) caused the command to be incorrectly parsed. - External string variables correctly re-implemented. This assumes that the external string has been declared as an array of characters ala C (tested with ZC and SAS/C), _not_ as a pointer to char! See entry for 9/9/94. 22/10/94 - ACE version 2.3 prepared for release (finally!). ******************************************************************************* 27/2/95 - Work on ACE recommenced after a 5 month break during which time ReqEd was developed (and 2 revisions released after v1.0), numerous fun programs were written by yours truly and a zoo of bugs was uncovered. These are now my priority before adding further features. - Fixed a bug in which too many gadgets were being refreshed when a gadget was modified, or removed and replaced. This sometimes resulted in ACE's 3D gadget imagery being mangled by old intuition imagery. 5/3/95 - Since bevelboxes were added to INPUTBOX[$] graphics.library has been required as well as intuition.library. This was not being explicitly opened, resulting in a GURU if some other command/function didn't open it. - Even when RANDOMIZE was used RND always returned the same first value. This has been corrected by having RANDOMIZE call RND once. - Linkable subprogram modules were unable to externally reference _EXIT_PROG in the main module requiring a kludgy workaround (see the Changes file in the latest version of the FontReq SUBmod). This has been rectified. 10/3/95 - Fixed a bug in which certain shared library function entries weren't recognised as being in a bmap file because of ACE mistaking a zero byte in a function offset for the end of the register list in certain entries. 11/3/95 - ALLOC function was sharing code with an internal db.lib memory allocation function. This worked fine so long as CLEAR ALLOC was never called. If db.lib had invoked any functions which called the alloc() function, CLEAR ALLOC caused the memory so allocated to be freed! This kind of coincidence happened rarely enough for the bug to evade my notice for some time. When developing ReqEd, the bug bit me however. I chose to employ a workaround in that case, but have now made a clear internal distinction between db.lib's and ALLOC's memory allocator. - While fixing the ALLOC bug, I noticed that in a couple of cases, internally (db.lib) allocated memory wasn't being freed. This has been fixed. - Fixed the nasty array bug which was discussed at length via the ACE mailing list in January. This involved ensuring that all occurrences of "(aN,d7)" were replaced by "(aN,d7.L)" so that d7 is considered to hold a LONGINT index for use with register indirect with displacement and index addressing mode. - Gadget imagery was being mangled when string, longint, potx and poty gadgets were closed. This has been fixed. - When button gadgets were closed and opened again using the same gadget-id, if no style parameter was specified upon reopening, the previous state (ON or OFF) was being retained! This was due to an internal flag not being reset when opening a gadget. This has been fixed. - Fixed a bug in the peephole optimiser in which code such as: CONST x = -2 y% = -x generated: move.w #--2,-(sp) instead of: move.w #2,-(sp) 12/3/95 - Button gadgets may now have their text's font and style specified. - Version 2.35 prepared for release. This is only a partial release: ace, db.lib ref.doc and this history log. - I expect there to be a few small releases (such as this one) in the next couple of months because it's the only way in which I can hope to provide ACE programmers with any updates at the moment. Work is very busy right now and study is keeping me busy at other times. ******************************************************************************* 7/8/95 - 8/8/95 - Recommenced work on ACE. - SUBs may now be used as event handlers via ON <event> CALL <SUBname>. 5/10/95 - 6/10/95 - Received permission from Dr Peter Kittel to make the bmaps and ACE headers (converted from C by Nils Sjoholm) available to the ACE community. Fantastic! - Fixed a dumb bug which caused certain borderline integers to be misclassified (ie. shortint instead of longint). This has been lurking for a long time but only recently caused problems. Thanks to Nils Sjoholm and Andrew Fineberg for alerting me. - Fixed a bug in ASSEM..END ASSEM in which certain assembly code caused "unknown symbol" errors. ******************************************************************************* 3/11/95 - Fixed a bug in SAY command which prevented multiple SAYs when no mode array was supplied due to a bogus check for non-existent data. This managed to hide due to the fact that I almost always supply a mode array. John Mason reported this behaviour to me. 5/11/95 - 6/11/95 - Exponentiation in ACE is now carried out via the IEEE single-precision function IEEESPPow() because it is more accurate and handles negative base values correctly. The parameters and result are converted to and from IEEE format respectively. This change was necessitated by a bug uncovered when strange behaviour was reported by Petteri Heikkinen, namely that if the base was negative and the exponent odd, the result was positive! This is manifestly a bug in the FFP mathtrans.library!! Surely this has been observed before by others!? I am as surprised as ever about this one... Only in the event that mathieeesingtrans.library can't be opened will the FFP SPPow() function be used. Note that this should only happen on systems with an OS prior to Release 2.0. Note also that bogus results will be obtained via the FFP function if the base is negative. This doesn't seem to be worth producing a fix for since only old systems will be affected. The following program ran in 5.4 seconds on my unaccelerated A1200 when the IEEE library was present and in 7.6 seconds when it was not: for i=1 to 10000 x = 2^3 next indicating an increase in performance with the IEEE function in use. This is despite the overhead involved in FFP <-> IEEE conversions. 6/11/95 - Added GADGET OUTPUT command. See ref.doc for more. This uncovered a bug in which the default value of a LongInt gadget was not being set at gadget creation time. It never showed up before because the only time the LongInt member of the StringInfo structure was examined was when a gadget event occurred by which time the LongInt structure member had been given a value. Since GADGET OUTPUT allows a LongInt gadget's value to be queried at _any_ time, unless the gadget had been modified (or the gadget selected), the LongInt field would still have been zero. This has been fixed by ensuring that the LongInt member is set when the gadget is created. 7/11/95 - Added GADGET(4) which returns the address of the last gadget selected via a gadget event or a call to GADGET OUTPUT. This can then be used in conjunction with Intuition library functions such as ActivateGadget() and so GADGET(4) plays a similar role for gadgets as WINDOW(7) and WINDOW(8) do for windows. 4/12/95 - Changed maximum number of user-defined windows from 9 to 16. The latter limit was imposed by the number of user task signals. Without employing a shared IDCMP for user-defined ACE windows, 16 would seem to be a hard limit, and even this assumes that all 16 user signals are available. 11/3/96 - 16/3/96 - Implemented random files after much thought about what was the best approach to take. ACE structures have been made central, such that far fewer commands and functions are necessary. See ace.doc and ref.doc for details. 11/6/96 - Added Common variables which behave identically to external variables except that they are defined within the enclosing source module and are *exported* to other modules. So, one ACE module can contain a common variable declaration, while another module can externally reference this variable. - Tightened up error checking for external variables and functions, ie. the compiler will now issue a warning if there's a duplicate identifer. 22/6/96 - Added Global variables which behave identically to external variables except that they are defined within the enclosing source module. Unlike Common variables, Globals are *not* exported to other modules. Like Common and External variables, Globals are static BSS objects. Also like Commons, Globals are intended for use in conjunction with SUBmods which require global data where the scope of the data is across a whole module from the point of declaration. Only simple variables are catered for, not arrays or structures, although Commons and Globals may be of type Address. 23/6/96 - Changed ((STRPTR)-1) to -1& for definition of NM_BARLABEL in libraries/gadtools.h. - Added pad byte to NewMenu structure in libraries/gadtools.h since ACE makes no attempt to word-align structure members, only whole structures, which are longword-aligned. 19/7/96 - Added Menu(2) function to return menu subitem. This was put into place to support GadTools menus. 4/9/96 - 9/9/96 - Added BLOCK..END BLOCK for true statement-blocks. ******************************************************************************* 9/10/96 - Fixed some problems with using workbench.library functions: wb.bmap should have been workbench.bmap, workbench/workbench.h wasn't including the file workbench/startup.h, funcs/wb_funcs.h "LIBRARY wb" occurrences changed to "LIBRARY workbench". Thanks to Nils Sjoholm for the fixes and to John Mason for trying to write the code that showed up the problem. 17/10/96 - Fixed the cause of enforcer hits in FONT command. Thanks to Herbert Breuer and Klaus Gessner for pestering me so much about this one. It was a pointer being dereferenced when it should not have been. - Also fixed an internal string-comparison function's handling of null-pointers. Found this unrelated bug while fixing the FONT bug. 4/10/98 - Prepared for final release under the Gnu Public Lisence, including source code.