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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : CMM2: RUNning a program named by a variable$ or string-expression
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thwill Guru  Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3830 |
The following post contains attributions to both matherp and TassyJim. I apologise in advance for any innaccuracies or misrepresentation. I've come across this limitation in my development work and thought I would share in the event that others hit the same. MMBasic on the CMM2 requires the target of a RUN statement to be a string literal , i.e. it doesn't allow you to do the following: s$ = "foobar.bas" Run s$ TassyJim suggested a workaround equivalent to the following: s$ = "foobar.bas" Open "/tmp.bas" For Output As s#1 Print #1, "Run " + Chr$(34) + s$ + Chr$(34) Run "/tmp.bas" But matherp said "This is a ... bad idea and causes the flash to be re-written twice." I think this argument was regarding wearing out the flash on the microcontroller, but it may also have been a comment on performance. I thought some more about it and believe the following should work without the double-hit on the flash: s$ = "foobar.inc" Open "/tmp.bas" For Output As s#1 Print #1, "#Include " + Chr$(34) + s$ + Chr$(34) Run "/tmp.bas" Though it does require you to provide foobar as a .inc file instead of a .bas file. Of course if you also need to execute foobar standalone you can just have a parallel foobar.bas file consisting of a single #Include statement. Best regards, Tom Edited 2020-06-28 22:59 by thwill Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3830 |
Dang! it doesn't work in the general case because .inc files are not allowed to #Include other .inc files  I guess I have to try an persuade Peter to make more changes  EDIT: and it would also be limited by the fact that #Include does not support absolute paths. Tom Edited 2020-06-29 07:24 by thwill Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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| thwill Guru Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 3830 |
I have been thinking some more about this and there are two related use-cases I'm seeking a solution for: 1. RUN a program where its name comes from a string expression. 2. RUN a program using the * command where that program is not situated in SEARCH PATH - some programs have additional .inc files and use other file resources you don't want to copy into SEARCH PATH and you don't want to use absolute paths to. - you don't want to hit the flash twice so the "solution" of having a stub file in SEARCH PATH that calls RUN on the real file is undesireable. I believe there is a single solution to both, and looking at the MMBasic source (Pi version) it doesn't look too difficult to implement: a. You define a .lnk file type that contains a single line containing the path of a .bas file to run. - ideally it would also allow comments because I'm interested in autogenerating these files and autogenerated files should always indicate their origin. b. When we use RUN or * and the file argument specifies a .lnk file then MMBasic reads that file and RUNs (i.e. "FileLoadProgram") the program specified therein. This fixes problem (1) as follows: s$ = "A:/subdir/foobar.bas" Open "/tmp.lnk" For Output As s#1 Print #1, s$ Run "/tmp.lnk" And for problem (2): If you create a file "zmim.lnk" in the SEARCH PATH containing: /zmim/src/main.bas Then typing *zmim would RUN /zmim/src/main.bas with only a single hit on the flash. Thanks for reading, Tom Edited 2020-07-01 23:14 by thwill Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
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