Hi Curtis,
I just wanted to point you to the "StarOffice 7 Programmer's Guide" (google it!) which is as far as I know the official no.1 manual/tutorial on Starbasic.
I was not frustrated about the information given to me back then when I started learning Starbasic, because this document gives you a good overview and fine working examples.
Making patches is not that easy as you would think :) and I don't know if you have been involved in OOo core development but before you can send in patches that might get accepted you need to sign the JCA form which is some kind of copyright contract with Sun Microsystems.
Anyway it's nice to see that you want to delve into a Starbasic "specification", as you said.
Does that mean you want to write a documentation?
Best Regards Christian Junker
Curtis Clauson wrote:
Andreas Bregas wrote:
I'm the responsible engineer for Star/OOo Basic. My focus clearly is MSVB compatibility. Your specification project sounds interesting. Could you please give some more details about your target. There are already some OOo Basic related resources as the OOo Office online help and Andrew's great macro book (see http://www.pitonyak.org/ AndrewMacro.sxw). How do you see the role of your specification in this context?
Please refer to this newsgroup thread for the full background of this task:
news://news.gmane.org:119/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The bullets are:
* There is no OOo Basic script language specification available to script developers or potential implementers.
* There is no up-to-date or comprehensive OOo Basic script language guide for script developers. The OOo help files are out-of-date, incomplete, and error-ridden. The only resources available on the OOo web site are sporadic, out-of-date, and incomplete.
* Mr. Pitonyak's book, while a wonderful resource for advanced usage, is a commercial product and therefore unacceptable as the only documentation of OOo Basic.
I've been gradually ripping into the OOo Basic implementation to create this specification. I'm hoping it will be accepted as a live document on the OOo Basic project website, and act as the definitive source for OOo Basic implementers and developers. It's just taking awhile since I have to reverse engineer everything, and what little commentary there is has to be translated from German.
Once done, I intend to create an up-to-date and comprehensive OOo Basic Developers Guide and updated help file pages. The documentation currently available to OOo users is out-of-date, incomplete, and full of errors. It does not provide the information a script developer needs to create effective OOo scripts, and is a constant source of frustration.
Since I'm deep into the implementation anyway, and it turns out to be an ancient procedural parser/generator/runtime architecture, and I've found a number of bugs and language inconsistencies, I wanted to know from what source this language was intended to be derived, if it was the ANSI Full Basic specification or some unknown Sun document, before I started creating patches or rewriting code.
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