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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.