Thought Id risk another cosmic yawn from the QL-ing community
and hereby intrepidly announce my latest baby, sb2htm!!
Yes, yes; anOTHER *2htm! I really got to work this one through my
system. Im having the whole house htmlised next. Wall2wall. After
that, no one can be sure. The pets have all fled; the wife is
terrified! (Shes waiting for the dreaded call: Honey, I just html-ised
the kids!) However, none of that need worry you one little bit. All
_you_ have to do is to try it out and enjoy!
So what does sb2htm do? The name says it all, really: It converts your
carefully knitted S*basic sauce code into truly glorious, neat,
logical, readable, syntax-coloured, navigatable html! And all for less
than the price of a penny stamp!
So what is it for? Many of us have tons of Basic programs, scripts,
fragements, and the like, lying around, much of it too dreary to read
and get into again. sb2htm will freshen them up, and may provide a
new view into your program design and structure: The various
components, such as variables, procedures, extension keywords,
separators, etc, can all have different colours (configurable). You
can jump from a keyword to its definition (and back again) in an
instant. It may even show up bugs you hadnt noticed before! (see
post script ;) If you have a PC(Mac/Windoze/Linux/etc) and a
colour printer, you can print out your syntax-coloured source files
via a browser.
Even if you dont write programs yourself you may be interested in
viewing them. Programs like Turbo or Project Planner are increadibly
complex, yet they can all be treated with sb2htm to become much more
readable (though you get some massive files!)
I hardly need suggest to S*Basic programmers what they could use it
for. Whether it is convenient to use or not is a matter of your setup,
more than anything.
Requirements: In theory the sb2htm program itself should work on any
reasonably competent QL setup, with at least 1 floppy & TK2. (The
Qliberator keyword QSAVE or equivalent is not required to run the
program or demo, but youll need it to process your source files prior
to treatment with sb2htm.) In practice, it has only been subjected to
limited testing (QPC/SMSQ, Aurora/SGC/Qubide/Minerva & SMSQ)
so it may fall over foolishly in other environments. Also the
QSAVE file format is undocumented and may hold surprises. Finally,
you really need a PC to view the files.
Please try it out! Let me know if there are problems, so I can have a
go at fixing them! Positive feedback is also very useful, eg "Seems
to work in Qlay, P" would give me at least a clue as to whats going
on, and whether there is any point in maintaining and upgrading the
program.
sb2htm is available from Dilwyn (ST ;) Jones' web site
http://www.soft.net.uk/dj/ , Other software page. The very latest
version is always available by email directly from me.
Per Witte
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
NB The "float bug" (see earlier mails) will cause sb2htm to hang
if it encounters floats larger than 1e308 in source files, when run
on later versions of QPC. A program that makes sb2htm crash in this
way is itself a potential time bomb!
