We added the system string variables
- DLM - Directory delimiter
- NID - Network/workstation name
- UID - User-id
- WHO - User-id (same as UID but for compatibility)
During the addition we also moved the SEP system variable out of the variable stack and assigned it a fixed position. Since MicroShare was at one time a multi-user/multi-tasking system many of the system variables were kept in the task stack. While this made for easy task switching it is not required nor optimal for the system to keep locating the values within the stack.
Since multi-tasking is now an OS issue and multi-threading would require a different approach than having task stacks, we can optimize the performance of MicroShare by moving these off the stack.
Little was done today on the actual coding within MSB, but instead we setup the user forum at http://forums.bbsysco.com. The forum software should allow us to keep in touch with the dealers and user community at large while providing a central repository of information pertaining the to language and development process.
One aspect of the forums that should prove invaluable is the ability to have online polling of the community so we can review concepts and ideas with them. We posted an initial poll regarding thefield seperator character to use in the files.
We created and updated the off-line CVS repository on our downtown server with the current copy of MSB. This repository will allow the dealers to follow along with the code change as they happen. Originally we thought we make the current / live CVS archives available but considering that occasionally we post work-in-progress changes to the CVS system in order to get them backed up, it is better to do the updates to the user accessible site when we know we have a clean source.
Today was spent trying to get the format and setup of the web site established. We have decided, at least for the moment, to go with a olive green and gray motif — the same as the Blog site.
It took a bit of work with CSS and HTML to get the look and feel right, but in the end the site layout looks pretty good; now all we need to do is add content which we hope to do over the next few days. With luck some of the code we developed for generating HTML based help files will be able to be used on the Microshare Basic documentation so we should be able to create the basis for an on-line help subsystem.
Didn’t get much of a chance to post any entries the past few days as I was working on enhancing the Syntax generation logic within MSB. As the product was initially provided the syntax tables were constructed from a few control files that were run through a GWBASIC program to create three include files:
rwt.h - which contains the syntax structure
rwtptr.h - which contains 26 pointers to within the structure based on the letters A-Z
rwtlistr.h - which contains pointers to the text keywords used by the lister.
We changed the logic so that a new file msb.syntax can be used to construct the include files while making the syntax easy to read and edit. This will allow us to change keywords and syntax structure fairly easily.
Longer term I would like to adjust the code so that it can be altered easier. Currently there are some hard-coded offsets in the logic that either should be changed or increased to allow for greater flexibility and growth in terms of directives and functions. While the extended directive, function, and variable sets would accommodate up to 255 extensions, the list pointer table can not accommodate it.
Also I would like to change the format of the rwtlistr.h table to be just offsets as opposed to addresses since this will improve load times by avoiding the loading having to absolutize the values.
A lot of time today was spent removing code relative to accessing BTRIEVE files and some GUI code that was Windows specific. We are continuing to clean up the code removing any unused modules and references to code that can not be included in the open source version.
Once we have a “Clean” open source version we will recreate a CVS or SUBVERSION base release in order to eliminate any of the questionable code from the source tree.
I have removed the automatic notification to http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ for the time being while we await the official launch of the website. No sense having people stumble across us accidentally.
Today rather than working on the ‘C’ code we spent the day updating our servers to a new Blog service “WordPress”. It had better functionality that the old blog software we were using including a spellchecker which I sadly need.
This Blog site is intended to be an on-going log that will help track the development of the BBSysco Open Basic system.
The goal of the blog is to allow us to detail the current progress and maintain a history of the development cycle so that others may see and comment on the process.
We trust that you will find it useful.
