Kyan Pascal - Who uses it?

[mark@pokey.jsc.nasa.gov (Mark Manning)]

I'm in the midst of writing new routines for Kyan Pascal (which works
under Prodos8).  If there are interested parties (I know of one at least)
who would like to benefit from what I am doing and who would like to
share some of the stuff they are doing, I would greatly appreciate knowing
about it.

What I am doing is trying to get up a library of routines so that later
one I can use them to do other things (like games, maybe a C compilier,
etc...).  So far I have created a number of string manipulation routines
such as: strcpy, strcmp, strcat, stricmp, strncpy, strcen (centers a given
string in its memory area [ie: A variable defined as 80 chars would be
centered within the 80 memory locations.].), and others.  I am also working
on hires commands to supplant the Kyan Pascal commands originally given on
the diskettes.  The original commands were too clunky for me and I've
managed to reduce most of them by at least a half if not more.  I'm working
on doing a shape table set of routines also.  I plan on having the full
set of Applesoft commands and then some so programming in Kyan Pascal will
be a lot better than it was.

On the string problem of placing the original information into the
variables, I may have a better idea on how it should be done (rather
than placing everything into a file and then reading them into the
variables - though that works quite well :) ).  I am thinking about
creating a routine called GETSTRING which will be an assembly language
program.  In GETSTRING will be all of the strings wanted by the program.
It will look something like this:

procedure getstring( theString, whichOne : integer );

begin
#a
   jmp gsp001
theInfo str 'First String'
   str 'Second String'
   .
   .
   .
gsp001 nop
;
; Pseudo code follows...
;
   Load in the address contained within theString.
   Load in which string to get.
   Move through the strings in theInfo until we get to the right one.
   Transfer the string to theString.
   Zero out anything left over in theString.
   Exit
#
   end;

I know this takes up memory, but the trade off is that it doesn't have
to go to the disk to read anything into memory.  Anyway, just a thought.

Let me know if anyone would like to see my work.  Later! :)


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Through the nights I've sat and wondered.  Why it is we waste and plunder.
This place in which we stay.  This world we've thrown away. - Mark Manning

mark@pokey.jsc.nasa.gov