d3bug

You said the F word!!! Actually, I do like Pascal... it kind of fits with my precision personality... however, I do love the fact that Action!/Effectus translates to ASM/ML instead of some stupid pcode crap that is little better than interpreted BASIC... The problem with most High level languages (with very few exceptions) is that most compile to P-Code with a runtime lib and what amounts to an interpreter. That is why I like Action!/Effectus... it's not like most of the others. There was another which is from the Commodore world, not well known, but from a Disk Magazine called LOADSTAR. It was called ZIP BASIC. It had many limitations not the least of which was that you could only have 1 command per line, and another was that it was written in BASIC, and had to compile whatever was in memory up to line number 31998 (everything after was ZIP BASIC), It was FAST though... I'll give you an example: 10 FOR F=1024 TO 2023 20 POKE F,A 30 NEXT F 40 A=A+1 50 IF A > 255 THEN A=0 60 GOTO 10 Now the above example in BASIC would take about 10min to run through all 256 characters poked to the screen RAM. ZIP BASIC would get ahold of it and it would take about 1 second to run through all 256 characters. The only time the "runtime library" was used was for math (floating point mainly).... aside from that, it wrote it to pure ML. I love that kind of efficiency... write in a high level language and filter it down to pure ML.

so, in essence, we agree... Just one thing I have been trying to get across: regardless of how difficult it is to write a routine yourself (all programmers have different levels of skill in ML), the point of Action! is to make things simpler, not to make you handcode routines (otherwise why not simply write the whole thing in ML right?... I mean graphics manipulation is MUCH simpler in pure ML/ASM after all).

NEEDing 15 digits of precision was really not the point. (no pun intended) Having the OPTION was. More choice iis better than less choice.

perhaps you missed the ": P" at the end... now who is the id10t?

That sounds great! I think it would be a nice addition. Effectus already is a wonderful cross tool, and this will only make it better... I have a question also for anyone, but particularly you since you are a developer familiar with more than one platform: When coding ML, you know how when you jump to one byte location is does one thing (whatever it is made to do), but if you were to jump as a different byte offset, it would do something else (or crash more than likely)? Anyway, a long long time ago in a state far far away (back in the day) I had the idea in my head it would be possible to make an assembler that would be smart enough (with multiple passes more than likely) to code in such a way as to overlap routines as much as possible so that for example you had two routines... each is 32 bytes long, and you call the first one at $4000, you could call the second one at say for example $400B and because of the overlap and the offset odd location it would be only 53 bytes long instead of 64.... I don't know if I am explaining this correctly or not, but I think you may understand. So, you think it would be possible to eek out a few less bytes with no loss in routines with a very efficient assembler like what I am talking about? /random thoughts

unless of course what is past the decimal point is about 15 digits long.... like in calculating rays.... but this is all academic. The point of Action! is to make things easier not more complicated. What is the point of having NO OPTION of FP math? I can't think of a single reason not to allow the USER to CHOOSE to use it or not... can you?

..... I'm sorry, you were saying?

One thing that seems to limit Action is the lack of a FLOAT type. It makes precision math neigh impossible in Action!. Do you think maybe while you are adding other features or maybe bugfixes maybe add FLOAT as a variable type? Yes I know floating point math is slow, BUT sometimes you just need to calculate the number of photons hitting a moon at a precise angle Seriously though I think FLOAT would be a very nice addition, and the floating point math routines could be hand coded for speed. Thank you for all your hard work on this project. I am seriously looking into using Action! for a game I am considering developing (Just waiting on legal authorization). It's based on the AD&D world (something we never officially saw from SSI) on the Atari 8bit platform.

I am using Altirra 2.40 to run bobsterm. No matter what command I issue inside the terminal (for example: ATDI BFBBS.NO-IP.COM 23) it returns "ERROR"... I have tried all baud rates, and I just don't know what I am missing... shouldn't this be connecting? PLEASE HELP.