In my continuing quest to improve the interpreter, I've come across a couple
of issues where I'd like some guidance.

The change I'm working on now has two aspects:

1 -- If there is a call to a subroutine that has not already been defined,
the interpreter first looks to see if there is another file that defines the
o-word. It does this by looking for a file named oNNNN (where NNNN is the
number of the o-word).

2 -- If there is no such file, it then starts skipping forward in the
current file until it finds the o-word. If there is no such o-word in the
current file, it is an error.

This capability allows files that have been executed in this manner to
reference o-words in other files with a limitation of the maximum number of
subroutine levels. At the present time, this is set at ten, but could easily
be increased.

This facility would let us have libraries of gcode that would be included by
reference. The next step would be to support named o-words. So,
o<InterpolateCircle>   would be a valid o-word, and would cause the file
InterpolateCircle to be loaded. (In the case of named o-words, I would not
put the letter 'o' in front of the name.)

The following issues arise:

1 -- What directory (or directories) should the interpreter look in for the
file oNNNN?  Some alternatives are: (a) a fixed directory, (b) specify a
directory search path in the configuration file, (c) specify a directory
search path by use of an environment variable (e.g.
GCODE_PATH=/home/emc/gcode:/usr/local/gcode)

2 -- Is there a standard extension we should use for gcode files? Should
that be oNNNN.ngc, for instance?

3 -- The error message facility in the interpreter is very limited in that
the messages are fixed. So in the case where the interpreter is skipping
forward in the file and the oword doesn't exist (in the case of a typo, for
instance), there is no apparent way for an error message to tell what o-word
it was seeking, what the name of the current file is, or what line in the
file called the missing oword.

I believe that I've seen a bug report that refers to the fact that an error
message is in english. Support for other languages in the error messages
would also be desirable, but I'm probably NOT the person to implement that.

4 -- The interface from the interpreter to Axis should probably be extended
so that axis can be aware of the current line number and file name. I'm not
familiar with the interface and would appreciate suggestions in this area.
(For all I know, that info might already be available.)

Thoughts, comments, criticism, etc would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ken


[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mark Kenny Products Company, LLC
55 Main Street                     Voice: (203)426-7166
Newtown, CT 06470                    Fax: (203)426-9138
http://www.MarkKenny.com


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