(Have changed the thread name as I'm moving away a little from the
original)
Actually there is quite a bit that can be done to enhance ED. Al
Boehm published in Quanta magazine April 2002 a DO file to move
blocks of superbasic under ED. Simon Goodwin wrote an extension
called, I think, LDEF to enhance ED by accessing procedures and
functions by name, and finally he also wrote a clipboard program and
extension that allowed copying and pasting into Superbasic ED and
other tasks. Mark Knight tweaked this program and published an
update. i expect the Dilwyn's repository will have all these
programs.
Regards
Duncan
LDEF is an extension by Gavin Monk, from June 1990 QL World (I only
know because I went to find it as I couldn't find it in DIY Toolkit)
page 24-25.
Simon did a very similar extension for his DIY toolkit. Actually, he
did lots of very useful stuff allowing you to rename names in the name
table, edit procs/fns by selecting a name from a menu, and so on.
THere's so much in DIY Toolkit it's hard to remember everything - have
a look at Simon's list on
http://simon.mooli.org.uk/QL/DIY_Toolkit.html
LDEF isn't on my website (I'd happily put it there if anyone can get
permission from Gavin Monk, if anyone knows him).
There's a similar extension by Malcolm Lear which went under the name
of CDandEDIT, which basically let you call ED by proc/fn name instead
of the usual line number, something like ED EDIT("procname") - can't
remember the full syntax.
The others which have been mentioned are mostly on my website, but
scattered across the Programming, Editors, Toolkits and Utilities
pages.
Has anyone used MasterBasic from Ergon Development? I did use it many
years ago but can't remember much about it.
The idea of a cut and paste environment for writing BASIC programs has
been suggested by Lee (I think he's used to such an environment on
Windows+Mac) and it would certainly be a great step forward. I think
the idea of enhanced ED was suggested when SBASIC came out, but I
think Tony Tebby said at the time that an advanced editor would
probably have to wait until someone like Jochen produced a more
integrated environment based on QD probably.
I think there have been many half-way solutions like Klipboard, name
based editing and the F10 solution in recent SBASICs, Tim Swenson's
Structured SUperbasic, editor-based program editing with links to
compilers and so on. I'm sure that the kind of environment Lee
suggested would be great if anyone has ideas on how to work towards
such a system.
As a starter. my Procman program lets you 'copy' procedures and
functions out of programs onto disk, which can then be merged into the
program (a kind of Library system). The source is included with that
program (procman_bas) if anyone wants to see how I did that part of
such an environment. Of course, a job-based editor wouldn't have the
syntax checking capabilities of the basic editor (EDIT and ED), but it
would be a start.
Dilwyn Jones
_______________________________________________
QL-Users Mailing List
http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
