basic preprocessor

[David J Venable]

well, a year and a half ago, i posted this: http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...read.php?t=456

and throughout the last year and a half i've been busy with work,
had family crises, etc. however, i think i'm getting to the point
where i can start working on this stuff again. so far i've
written a fully functional preprocessor (i'm sure there are
bugs galore, and i'm even more sure that there are 20 million
ways to do it all more efficiently), so i figured i'd put what
i have out on the web and let people mess with it and see what
they think. so here it is:
http://www.anyhack.org/bdk.zip

when you unzip it, make sure that you preserve the directory
structure. this includes binaries, source, examples, some
documentation, etc. it is distributed under the gnu gpl.

also, you can reach me at [email protected] so, please let me
know what you think, improvements that you'd like to see,
improvements that you've made, etc., etc.

thanks a lot.

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[Matthias Kuhn]

Hello Davide,

i´d a look at Your pbk work. I think You´ve had a lot of work
and I hope You can use it. And there a single interesting functions
in it.

But there are lot of ready tools in the air to do similar things.

And I see the danger that You 'invent the wheel a second time'.

And the next is - how long does it work ? Now it´s difficult to
connect Windows-compatible-suff ( printer scanner modems .. ) at
all to long existing and good working Dos-Programms. And in future
1 - 5 years I see the problem to get new PC's working with Dos and
using all equipment of it ( e.g. USP port IR-port... ) .

Regards

Matthias Kuhn

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[Davide Vecchi]

David, i have been able to give only a quick look at your work, it seems very interesting to me. I hope i' ll have the opportunity to look at it more deeply soon, i really love the idea of writing object oriented code to be compiled by PB/DOS.

Matthias, do you mean existing tools to do that (object oriented code to be compiled with PB/DOS) ? I understand your concerns about reinventing the wheel, however the main point i see in David's work for my possible use is that it would still let me compile with PB/DOS.

About the possible problems you suggest regarding hw and future PCs not supporting DOS, i look at that upside down : i find interesting the possibility to write sw that doesn't require a Pentium III with 256MB RAM and an internet connection just to write a letter, which seems where we are going today. Whether that possibility has a market value or not i don't know, these previsions are more difficult than what they seem.

DOS-is-dead-no-it-isn't discussions have never lacked and i wouldn't add to them; i just welcome any new tool around PB/DOS.

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Davide Vecchi
[email protected]

[Jim Gillem]

For the "dos is dead or will be - " crew" - why not check out:

"NEWDOS" from a PB member in China or near China.

(on top of WIN9X - don't know about XP 2K ETC.)

It really has worked for me..

JRG

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[David J Venable]

Well, I will admit that there is a bit of wheel reinvention
going on here, however there is a reason for that. Licensing.
I want to release the entire thing under the GPL and I'd
rather not incorporate some freeware that is not under the
same license. Secondly, it's a project that I started in
order to learn about this stuff. The preprocessor does very
similar things to the C preprocessor: includes files, expands
macros, conditional compilation, etc. It adds quite a few
features to power basic imho. I also have the framework for a
lint-type program for pb that I've been working on, and next is
a OO pb front-end. Now, these are pretty heavy words to be
throwing around, but with other peoples' help and some time,
it can be done.

In additions, these tools will be useful to any basic programmer,
not just PB DOS, and eventually, not just PB.



[This message has been edited by David J Venable (edited September 05, 2002).]