This is not the droid you’re looking for. Because it’s not a droid – it’s a module.
Steve Drain has released version 0.20 of MCPIO, a small, specialised module to control the MCP23017 IIC expander ports on the Raspberry Pi, along with an updated version of Basalt with a new MCPIO keyword. Continue reading »
IF LEN(string$)>255 THEN don’t be left stranded
Last month, Steve Drain announced the release of version 1.50 beta of Basalt, his module that provides extra features to BBC BASIC V. This version provides support for long strings, which Steve refers to as ‘strands’. There is also a comprehensive StrongHelp manual, but as yet there isn’t an online HTML version available.
Briefly explaining strands, Steve says: Continue reading »
Beta Basalt for a better BASIC.
Steve Drain, developer of Basalt, has released a new version of the module. Short for BASIC Alternative keywords, Basalt is a module that adds many additional keywords and features to all versions of BBC BASIC V, the built in programming language included as part of the ROM (or ROM Image) in all versions RISC OS.
Version 1.42 beta is intended as a stable – with a bracketed question mark in Steve’s announcement – version of the previous alpha version, with additional features: Continue reading »
Steve Drain, prompted by a discussion in the RISC OS Open Ltd forum about AppBasic, has written a document about the using the Toolbox with Basalt which, he explains, has never been very well described. Basalt (“BASic ALTernative keywords”) is a module that extends BASIC by providing “alternative keywords by extending the use of actual keywords and adding new keywords, both of which are used completely as native BASIC keywords.”
The document is available online, at the link given above, and it is also included in the download for the prototype application, BasaltApp.
Steve explains that “a program is event-driven from a machine code wimp poll loop under the keyword POLL. Events and messages are registered against functions called to handle them. Apart from the use of ResEd to design the user interface there is no need for any other development environment.” Continue reading »
Steve Drain has released a number of BASIC libraries, and a new version of the Basalt module.
The Strings BASIC library provides routines for handling long strings, referenced by normal string variables. All the standard string keywords are emulated and work with any combination of normal string variables and expressions and long strings. Written to explore a new idea for providing long string support in Basalt, which is yet to be fully written, Steve is releasing the library because it may be of interest. Continue reading »