BBSysco development log  Business Basic Systems Corporation

While we were in the code today adding some new functions, we took the time to increase the number of new extended directives, variables and/or functions we can add.  This table was initially set at 360, but we decided to increase the values to provide for easy addition of more extensions.

While this change was easy to accomplish, we felt it better to do it now than have to stumble onto the preexisting limit and something break in the future.

Added (or should I say finished the implementation of) the MASK function.  The original MSB source we started with only had a MASK function ’stub’ so we implemented it.  The MASK function regular expression uses standard POSIX expression standards for expression evaluation.  We also added the MSL system variable.

We also added the MID function and an option 3 to the STP function to remove ALL occurrences of character within the string.

This was the first major test of the new Syntax parser definition structure and it proved quite easy to add new functions and variables.  A good test of the flexibility of the syntax parser will be modifying the NEXT directive not to require a variable and the auto-increment/decrement operators ( ++ / — ).  While I think the NEXT will work in the current logic the ++ / — will likely need some internal logic.

Added GLOBAL file handles to MSB this morning.  Rather than extending the file handles beyond the current range, we decided to use the range of 32000 through 32499 for global file handles.  This allows for up to 500 global files which should be more than enough for most applications.

We will look at completing the addition of the GFN function later today.

We checked out the new syntax control file msb.syntax and its associated generation utility to verify that the code works correctly.  In order to fully it through the paces we added the following system variables:

• LFO
• LFA
• HFN
• UNT

The logic worked well and should make adding new variables and functions easy.  We should add an overflow check for the listing table in case the number of added variables, functions or directives exceeds the table capacity.

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.

Spent much of today adjusting the File/Record locking routines to use ‘fcntl’ as opposed to ‘lockf’.  Fcntl allows the application to utilize READ locks as opposed to WRITE locks.  We also altered the mechanism used to “Lock” files to use different bytes plus to utilize a lock gate that avoids the possibility that a failed LOCK could end up being a non-recoverable error.

During the testing we discovered an error exit that could be taken during the Open logic and would leave the file open — highly unlikely occurrence but possible.

In order to simplify locking and other OS specific routines we introduced a concept of os_XXXXX functions which will map into OS specific modules.  This makes the mainline code cleaner rather than having to have many conditional pre-processor directives for each platform.

In keeping with long term desire to rename the modules within MSB to ake it easier to follow and identify the nature of module based on its name, we renamed all the generic math routines (Add, Subtract, …) from vadd, vsub,… to mathAdd, mathSubtract, …

This should make the functions easier to follow long term.  Ultimately we will try to convert all functions to this format.

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 updating all the copyright statements in all the modules in preparation to uploading the CVS repositories on our server.  We had to create a small program to pull out all the existing copyright notice information, company name, address, and copyright dates from the existing code and insert a GPL compatible notice along with the original information.

Now that the copyrights have been applied we can take an extract of the initial CVS system and create a new one going forward.  We did not want to start with the original code as provided to us since it did contain a variety of externally sourced pieces of code.

We also set up the CVS server (cvsd) with it associated security component.  The program ViewCV was installed and configured so that the once we have the initial version complete we can upload it and make it available.

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.