Version 1.11 17/09/2001
Darren Salt (ds@youmustbejoking.demon.co.uk) contributed a number
of the changes in this version of the program.
- Added support for reading Acorn five byte floating point
values (Darren Salt).
- Improved support for reading and writing Acorn eight byte
floating point values on machines that use a different format
for this sort of number to what Acorn use (Darren Salt).
- Added support for reading gzip'ed files under Linux (Darren
Salt).
- The Linux version of the program can be installed using
'configure' (Darren Salt).
- Added code to detect the format of eight byte floating point
numbers on the platform on which the interpreter is running.
This is used when reading and writing such values (DD, based
on original code by Darren Salt).
- The first line of a program in text form is now ignored if
it starts with a '#' in all versions of the interpreter.
This only used to be supported in the NetBSD and Linux
versions.
- Changed handling of syntax errors detected when a line is
tokenised. The interpreter now puts out a slightly more
meaningful 'syntax error' message if a program with such
an error in it is run instead of 'STOP'.
- DIM statements of the form 'DIM abc%!8 100' are now
dealt with correctly. Previously the code always wanted
a variable as the location at which to store the address
of the byte array and did not allow the use of an
indirected expression. This was an oversight in the code
and has now been fixed.
- Fixed bug where the string memory management was not being
reset under certain conditions when a program was edited.
The program was being corrupted if a string expression was
evaluated immediately prior to editing the program and then
again immediately afterwards.
- Fixed bug in ERROR statement code where ERROR 0,<text>
was not being treated as a fatal error, that is, the
error could be trapped by ON ERROR. Also fixed problem
where ERR was not returning the user-supplied error
number after an ERROR statement.
- Fixed bug in handling of ON ERROR LOCAL where a storage
overwrite was causing the interpreter to abort with a
'interpreter has gone wrong' message when restoring LOCAL
variables to their original values when dealing with an
ENDPROC after branching to the statements after the ON
ERROR LOCAL.
- Fixed bug in READ statement that affected the reading of
strings in cases such as 'READ a$,b$: DATA abcd,', that is,
there is nothing after the last comma in the DATA statement.
It should return a null string, but the code was skipping to
the next DATA statement instead.
Version 1.12 01/12/2001
- Split interpreter.c into four files and moved some stuff
around. Renamed some files.
Version 1.13 28/11/2002
- Included new RND code written by Crispian Daniels.
- Included fixes for various graphics problem written
by Crispian Daniels.
- Incorporated new MacOS target written by Crispian
Daniels.
- Incorporated new FreeBSD target written by Dirk Engling.
- Removed limit on the number of command line arguments
returned by ARGV$.
- Fixed problem in Unix version of program where screen
output was not being displayed before using OSCLI.
- Added new VDU function. This returns the value of the
specified RISC OS VDU variable.
- Added new function COLOUR. This returns a value that
represents the closest colour to the colour with the
specified colour components in the current screen
mode.
- Added missing GCOL <red>,<green>,<blue> statement
- Added extended form of GCOL statement: GCOL OF ... ON
- Added extended form of COLOUR statement: COLOUR OF ... ON
- Added extended MODE statement: MODE <x>,<y>,<bpp>,<rate>
- Extended the DIM statement to support the
DIM <variable> LOCAL <size>
version of the statement.
- Checked program compiled and worked using the Castle C
compiler.
Version 1.14 28/07/2003
- Quick hack to fix DIM ... LOCAL problem. The problem was
that the code to check that writes using indirection
operators were to legal addresses blew away writes to
byte arrays on the stack. I have removed this check so
that the stack can written to.
Version 1.15 16/08/2003
- Added '*key' to allow strings to be defined for
function keys as on a BB Micro or RISC OS machine.
Version 1.16 25/01/2004
- Added OpenBSD target (changes supplied by Julian Smith).
- Added Amiga target (changes supplied by Stefan Haubenthal).
- Fixed bug in tokenisation code where any keyword immediately
followed by a '.' was taken as abbreviated and the '.'
always skipped. This should not have been happening when
the full keyword was supplied. The '.' in this case is the
start of a floating point number.
- Changed the handling of the function 'TOP'. Brandy used to
have a token for this function but it is not how the RISC OS
Basic interpreter treats it. It uses the token for 'TO'
followed by the letter 'P'. This means that the interpreter
determines from the context whether this is the function 'TOP'
or the keyword 'TO' followed by a variable name starting
with 'P'. Brandy now works the way the RISC OS interpreter
does.
- Fixed bug in handling of 'ERR'. The number of the last error
was not being saved so that it could be referenced using
ERR except in the case of errors raised via 'ERROR'. This
bug was introduced in 1.11 when the *opposite* problem was
fixed!
- Added '*' command emulation to versions running Unix-type
operating system. Previously it was DOS only.
- Changed handling of OS commands to that leading blanks and
'*' are removed first.
- Added new command line option '-nostar' to stop program
checking all '*' commands to see if they are emulated by
the interpreter.
- Tidied up the output on 'help' which shows the where the
Basic program and variables are.
Changes since 1.05:
Version 1.06 15/12/2000
- Bug where functions could be used as procedures (and vice
versa) fixed.
- Fixed bug in the VAL function where it would sometimes return
the wrong result as the string being converted was not
terminated properly.
- Fixed bug in BPUT introduced in 1.05.
- HIMEM can now be changed.
- Blank lines in files are no longer discarded when loading a
program.
- The initial value and step used if the lines of a program are
renumbered when loading a program have been changed to 1 and
1 respectively, the idea being that they will match the numbers
of the lines of the program in the file in an editor.
- Under RISC OS, the 'edit' command can now invoke editors such
as StrongED and Zap.
- Added limited support for making BBC MOS calls via USR and
CALL so that OS_Byte 0 could be used to determine the type of
the machine on which the interpreter is being run.
Version 1.07 01/01/2001
- Fixed bug in function SUM when the argument was a string array.
The function should return all of the strings in the array
concatenated together but it was producing rubbish.
- Fixed bug in function SUM LEN. This was failing with the error
message 'type mismatch: array wanted'.
- Fixed bugs in the EOF and EXT functions that show up when the
file is not a disk file but, for example, a serial port.
- Sorted out some more portability issues, but at a cost of
making the program about 10% slower.
- The code for the OSCLI ... TO statement has been improved.
- The RISC OS version of the program has been changed to use
direct OS calls in fileio.c instead of C library functions. This
allows Basic programs to carry out I/O operations on a file using
a mixture of Basic statements and SWIs.
- The INPUT# code has been tidied up.
- Typing in token values directly on the command line is now
handled correctly, for example, typing in the hex value &F1
no longer gives the error 'The interpreter has gone wrong'.
- Under NetBSD and Linux, the handling of I/O redirection on the
program's command line has been sorted out. It is now possible
to invoke the program so that it takes input from or directs
output to a file instead of using the keyboard for input and
screen for output.
- The QUIT command can now optinally be followed by a value that
the interpreter passes back to the underlying operating system
as a return or status code.
Version 1.08 19/04/2001
- Fixed 'big endian' bug in code that checks if a file contains
a tokenised Basic program. The test was failing on big endian
machines.
- Changed code that writes the four byte start marker at the
start of a Basic program so that it is always written in
the same order, that is, fixed another endian bug.
- Extended the WAIT statement so that the time to wait can
be supplied. The time interval is in centiseconds.
Version 1.09 29/04/2001
- Fixed bug in INSTR where the end of the string being searched
was missed when the first character of the wanted string
occured a number of times in the search string.
- Tidied up STR function so that STR$~ produced the same results
as PRINT~, for 'STR$~255' now produced 'FF' instead of 'ff'.
Also changed the format for floating point values so that an
exponent is marked with an 'E' instead of an 'e'.
- Fixed bug in INPUT statement where INPUT ' cleared the screen
instead of skipping to the next line.
- Fixed bug in INPUT statement where 'INPUT TAB() <variable>'
printed a '?' prompt when it should not have done so.
- Fixed a problem in EVAL where the pointer to the expression
that contained the EVAL function was being corrupted if the
string being evaluated contained a reference to a function
that had not been called before. 'EVAL(EVAL(a$))' now works
as well.
Version 1.10 28/05/2001
- Fixed bug in EDIT introduced fixing EVAL in version 1.09. A
'bad token' error message was being produced when editing a
single line with EDIT <line> under DOS and Unix. The amended
line was being saved correctly but the error message was then
being displayed.
- Tidied up handling of @% in PRINT and STR$ when the number of
digits to print is zero. '@%=0: PRINT PI' now produces
3.141592654 instead of 3, as per the Acorn interpreter.
- Added function XLATE$. This either translates a string using
a user-supplied translate table or translates it to lower case
if no translate table is supplied.
- Added function VERIFY. This is used to check that a string
contains only specific characters.
- Changed EDIT and EDITO so that EDIT uses the last EDITO value
instead of LISTO when converting the program to text when it
is edited. If EDITO has not been used, the LISTO value is
used instead.
Brandy is an interpreter for BBC Basic (or Basic V as it is refered
to here) that runs under a variety of operating systems. Basic V
is the version of Basic supplied with desktop computers running
RISC OS. These were originally made by Acorn Computers but are now
designed and manufactured by companies such as RiscStation and
MicroDigital.
