bson@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Jan Brittenson) (02/08/91)
A new version of STAR is available. It runs on SPARCs, and probably on Apollo Domain/IX boxes as well. The STAR.EXE is still 1.04.1 as the serious bugs didn't affect the MS-DOS version. It's available with anonymous FTP as star-1.04.2.tar.Z on trix.ai.mit.edu. STAR 1.04.2 list of changes: o Formal macro argument symbol names are checked. Note that the symbols "A", "B", "C", and "D" are names of registers. The macro name itself is also checked. o A macro in hp48.star using the symbol name C has been changed. o Return code is 0 if no errors were signaled. This is important when using STAR within a make script. o Sometimes, on some machines, comments were ignored when looking for a label definition. I didn't bother trying to figure out why; it was faster to simply rewrite the code - it's much more robust now. o Default file types weren't handled correctly if the directory component contained dots. An example is "../foo". STAR now recognizes unix, MS-DOS, and VMS file name syntaxes. o Numbers starting with a 0 are now (correctly) interpreted in octal. 255 == 0xff == 0377. If you have any ideas for future improvements of STAR you'd like to see realized, send me mail. So far the following has been suggested: o Include files. This is a potential patent problem. I may circumvent it by only including files unless they have been previously included. o .symbols loading. o Loops. o Search paths. o ASC support. o Making command line options available for conditional assembly. o Regex matching. o HP IDS compatibility. Ideas? Send me mail! -- Jan Brittenson bson@ai.mit.edu