knnngt@ukma.UUCP (Alan Kennington) (12/29/85)
I am very annoyed at the basic that I got for the ST. I've just finished writing some 16K of code that disassembles 68K code. The program is really nice. But it doesn't work. And I have to blame the tools: this BASIC is pathetic!!! Having identified numerous important bugs and written the program to specifically to avoid these, I've found that the interpreter just can not handle strings. It just messes tham up completely. The problem is string assignments. Strings are read in nicely from disk files. I have a program on disk which is written in an interpreter language which I wrote specifically (ie I designed the language) for disassembling 68000 code. The Basic program of some 450 lines acts as interpreter for this disassembly program, representing each line of the file as a string. First I read the file into an array of strings. And then as I execute each line, I need to assign the string to a temporary string in order to use it. But the Basic interpreter can not even read the string in an array into a fixed string. It also messes up lines like kk$ = right$(kk$,len(kk$)-1) [and] kk$ = right$(kk$, k) Either there is something obscure I don't know about BASIC or else this interpreter has a problem with management of the space allotted to strings. It keeps overwriting where it shouldn't in the string working space. At first I thought it would be a good joke to decode 68k using a Basic program driven by another program written in an interpreter language. Then I thought was it was not such a great joke when I realised that I would have to keep rewriting things to avoid the bugs. I thought that eventually I would use my disassembler to disassemble, dismantle and fix the BASIC. But it seems to have enough bugs to prevent anybody from easily finding the bugs. And I'm not going to hand disassemble a 130k interpreter. How could anybody possibly run anything on such a BASIC??? Surely DR knew about all the bugs. I know they were pressed. But now I'd like to ask just one question. When is BASIC REALLY going to come out for the ST??? I mean one with a tolerable bug level!!! Alan Kennington. PS I only use basic because it's there. As soon as my dev kit comes, I'm going to fix the bugs in Basic and then put it in the trash. "Gentlemen, we have the technology to rebuild BASIC."