Re: Looking for a free basic compiler for DOS

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:41:17 -0500,
ArarghMail703NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

A complete recompile and relink of a system of, say 100 to 200 modules
of varying sizes and complexity took about 1 to 3 minutes.

But what a headache keeping track. :-)

Naw! That's the kind of job we have computers for, hahahahaha.

I wrote a program to do that. It read the source file - one huge
mother of an ide file - and created separate source files for each SUB
or FUNCTION and also a compile list in a .BAT file and a link list in
a .BAT file, from the main and all the SUBS it encountered.

Then a single button-push compiled it all and ran a test. I usually
never even had time for coffee.

This was also necessary to overcome particular PDS size limitations.

If you put a huge pile of variable matter into COMMON SHARED, you
could run a truly large program in the IDE.

But anything bigger than around 6,000 source statements or so was too
big to compile in one bc step. But if you break it up into separate
compile steps, you had to have a copy of the COMMON SHARED stuff in
each separate SUB file.

But that wouldn't fit into the IDE, because there it wanted to keep
another separate copy of COMMON SHARED every time it encountered it in
another one of the SUB source files - even though it was supposed to
be the same!

So to make big programs, I had one huge COMMON SHARED pile of
variables once near the beginning of the main routine, and included
the source for all the SUBS in the same source file.

The largest one I ever ran in the IDE this way was about 22,000 source
lines.

Then I ran it thru my "make compile files" program, and compiled it.

My qlbs & libs usually consisted of I/O routines for multi-port serial
cards, my own asms for screen 12 line graphics, and the odd additional
thing, like formatting of screen output fields.

I only ever maintained the single copy of COMMON SHARED that was in
the main source file, so that never got out of whack - it just got
split off to an INC file at the beginning of the compile preprocessor
step and inc'd into each SUB file that was created.

It was a bit of screwing around to come up with that solution in the
first place, but you have to realize how fast you could build some
really complex programs with all the sorce in the ide at once!

These were not trivial applications either - it was all real time
stuff, usually running ships navigation with all the connected
instrumentation - GPS, DGPS data link and QC, gyrocompass, depth
sounder, subsea ROV tracking sonar, magnetometer, autopilot, pipeline
washout scanning sonar, sidescan/multibeam sonar, 3-axis heave, pitch
& roll sensor, pipeline conductivity meter, etc etc etc.




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