Quote  

Isn't there a solution to detect this?

Of cause I edit the code basically on my PC, this happened during bug fixing. And changing 20 bytes often takes 5 hours and I'm not thinking about a save just because I changed one value. But the beginning of the chain is the the interchange between PC and pico which is not convenient(enough). XMODEM for me does not do that well for me, too unstable.
I think it would be a very good idea to find an in(ter)vention.
Edited 2025-05-06 18:45 by dddns

  matherp said  

What is the consensus on having a mandatory space before the continuation character?

I don't see any need for this. Those who use variables with an underscore at the end can specify a different character in the options.
Regards
MIchael

  Quote  

  Quote  

I think it would be a very good idea to find an in(ter)vention.

Why not implementing a c: drive to directly access the PC over a uart adapter having a small QT GUI running managing it?

  matherp said  

What is the consensus on having a mandatory space before the continuation character?

Yes please.

John

I just type shorter lines....  ;)

always good to have friends :))

Hi Peter,

I think requiring a mandatory space is probably a good idea, though maybe not essential, you might consider just catching and disallowing variable names with trailing underscores. Z-MIM has some variable names that are just '_' which I use when catching a return value from a function I am not interested in (it's a convention in several other languages), I'll have to "fix" those either way.

I think allowing the line continuation character to be user-specified is a mess for two reasons:
 1. More combinations to be broken.
 2. Exchange of programs between users with different line continuation character.

Note that if this ever comes to the CMM2 then you'll have to worry about the *magic comments* you add to the end of lines so that their original line and file number can be shown in error messages ... is this an issue on the PicoMite RP2350 for `CMM2 RUN` ? I'll have to deal with this in MMB4L too if/when I add support for this feature.

Best wishes,

Tom
Edited 2025-05-06 19:36 by thwill

Hi Tom

I intend to add the requirement for space,underscore and disable the ability to select a continuation character. Of course enabling continuation character is optional and by default will be off.
This code is not needed and won't be implemented on the CMM2/MMB4W because the editor supports horizontal scrolling.
CMM2 load will temporarily turn off continuation characters so should not be affected.
It would be nice to replace continuation characters where the user has put them but to do this would need a magic code which is ignored by the interpreter and I can't think of a way of doing this as it could be in the middle of a string or variable name etc. and long strings is one of the key advantages of the thing in the first place
Edited 2025-05-06 19:56 by matherp

Hi Peter,
Personally if you are going to introduce a continuation, then I think
space underscore is a good choice.
On another tack, I'm in the process of getting the chess client working on an LCD Pico, I'm using a recent RC, I've found a small problem.
I have to send the command "help" to the second chess playing Pico on Com2. When I do this, it is being picked up by the interpretor and I get an error, can't find A:/help.txt, which is persumably for the help system which was added, the only way I can think of getting over this, would be to compile a version of chess, which only needs the string hlp, or whatever, so I can send that, without triggering the inbuilt help system?

  thwill
I think allowing the line continuation character to be user-specified is a mess for two reasons:
 1. More combinations to be broken.
 2. Exchange of programs between users with different line continuation character.
/QUOTE said  

I'm not a professional in coding but now that I have my first experience with sitting endless hours in front of complex logic that I can't imagine to use this feature as I think it will mess up the overview on PC.

So I think professional coding will be standard without this?

Bleep: please confirm OK - HELP changed to HLP - can't remember if I was playing with this for anything else.

ChessRP2040.zip

ChessRP2350.zip

Hi Peter,
Will give it a go, however I've just realised, that of course I don't need to send help to the chess playing Pico, it only returns help text, I can simply generate all the help text in the Basic program and not send anything to the com port.
In fact it's probably best I do it that way, then the chess program stays exactly as standard, sorry for the interruption. Would you like me to test the version above with hlp to see if that works?
Regards Kevin
Edited 2025-05-06 20:54 by Bleep

I've updated V6.00.02RC22 on

https://geoffg.net/Downloads/picomite/PicoMite_Beta.zip

The continuation if enabled now requires space underscore " _" as the last characters on the line.
In addition, even without continuation lines enabled, the editor will no longer exit if a line >255 characters has been created.

NB: if you have a file with a line starting '# at the top please just delete it. Hopefully it shouldn't then re-appear

Problem gone! Many thanks

  dddns said  

But the beginning of the chain is the the interchange between PC and pico which is not convenient(enough). XMODEM for me does not do that well for me, too unstable.

Have you tried F10 (AUTOSAVE)? This is my favorite method--edit on the PC using Notepad++, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, F10 (in Teraterm), Ctrl-V, Ctrl-Z (when transfer complete).

Some (VegiPete) put AUTOSAVE on the first line of their program so they don't need the F10. I think VegiPete has also said that he puts a Ctrl-Z at the end of the Notepad++ text.

It takes longer to say how to do it than to actually do it.

  lizby said  

  dddns said  

But the beginning of the chain is the the interchange between PC and pico which is not convenient(enough). XMODEM for me does not do that well for me, too unstable.

Have you tried F10 (AUTOSAVE)?

Thanks for the hint, I overlooked this up to now but it solves only the problem that the transfer to the pico is much better than with XMODEM. But I was looking more for the other direction.

Anyway, if I execute AUTOSAVE then cut my connection and cat the file to tty it works great. Reconnecting and  hitting F1 or F2 crashes Pico  with "invalid address"

Curious that the last line transferred was displayed in my tty console after reconnecting!
Edited 2025-05-06 23:04 by dddns

  Quote  

I was looking more for the other direction.

To go from the Pico to the clipboard press F3 to send the program to the terminal window (TeraTerm), highlight what you want and paste it wherever you want.

However Tassy Jim's MMEdit is the excellent in both directions, just click a button.

Many thanks, I would like to use my regular terminal in linux with e.g. screen

All these extra software I'd like to avoid. Except it would be very nice like integrate it in one of the best editors there are like ..VSC and like Arduino does including having a serial console.
But for me the next problem arises even though its perfectly available for linux and that is that I have cut MS in 2004
Edited 2025-05-06 23:37 by dddns

  matherp said  

Bleep: please confirm OK - HELP changed to HLP - can't remember if I was playing with this for anything else.

ChessRP2040.zip

ChessRP2350.zip

Apologies Peter,
Nothing to do with the terminal or Com port data, I had a subroutine called help!
I did test the above ChessRP2040, with hlp and it worked as expected, once I renamed the subroutine, if nothing else it helped me track it down. :-)
Thanks Kevin.

  matherp said  

I've updated V6.00.02RC22 on
The continuation if enabled now requires space underscore " _" as the last characters on the line.
In addition, even without continuation lines enabled, the editor will no longer exit if a line >255 characters has been created.

I won't shed a tear over the lack of a choice for the line continuation character..

An unrelated question: Is it possible that files transferred from PicoMite to TeraTerm using XMODEM are always padded with 0 bytes to a size divisible by 128 (256?)? Is this related to a fixed packet size in XMODEM?

I was just wondering when I backed up my Basic programs from PicoMite to my PC using XMODEM before an update.
I assume MMBasic doesn't have any problems doing it the other way around, and the excess 0 bytes are simply ignored?

If you wanted to back up (binary) data files to your PC using XMODEM, you would have to take this into account and ignore the excess bytes.

Regards, bfwolf
Edited 2025-05-07 00:05 by bfwolf