Can I Use Another IDE??

[caffey]

Is it possible to use another IDE? No offense but the indentation settings (like number of spaces for indentation) aren't sitting well with me and I can't find a place to adjust the setting.

Thanks

[guest]

Is it possible to use another IDE? No offense but the indentation settings (like number of spaces for indentation) aren't sitting well with me and I can't find a place to adjust the setting.

You don't say whether you are referring to BBC BASIC for Windows (BB4W) or to BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 (BBCSDL) and in the context of the IDE that distinction is obviously important. For a start, BBCSDL is already supplied with two different IDEs (Andy Parkes' BBCEdit and my SDLIDE) so you have a choice to begin with. Also, both those IDEs are themselves coded in BASIC so are easily customisable. The supplied BB4W IDE, on the other hand, has remained virtually unchanged for more than 15 years so the only way to 'customise' that (beyond what is provided for) would be to replace it entirely. However, SDLIDE (one of the IDEs supplied with BBCSDL) will run under BB4W too!

So with the limited amount of information you have provided all I can say is that, yes, you can certainly use an alternative IDE. Both BB4W (full version) and BBCSDL come with the BBC BASIC Run Time Engine as a separate file (bbcwrun6.exe in one case, bbcsdl.exe in the other) so a replacement IDE could execute BASIC programs just like the native ones can. If you want to experiment with writing your own IDE, or adapting one of the existing ones, then SDLIDE.bbc - which runs under both BB4W and BBCSDL - would be a good starting point.

Richard.

[caffey]

Awesome!!! Richard thanks so much for the reply and yes I was referring BBC4W initially

I had done a little modification to SDLIDE but didn't think to run it with BBC4W but I'll give that a try (Although I hadn't purchased the full version yet so I don't have bbcwrun6.exe file YET)

Thanks so much

[Orac]

I too would like to use an external IDE for development, namely UltraEdit which I use frequently and am familiar with its tools.

I've configured UltraEdit to run bbcwrun6.exe on the editors active file but it seems that the run-time engine will only work for .bbc files and not text .bas files.

I confirmed this by opening a command prompt and running bbcwrun6.exe with a .bas file, and I get an output window which just says "Bad Program". If I run it with a .bbc file, it works fine.

Is there a work around for this? or am I missing a step (apart from having to convert .bas to .bbc in the BB4W IDE, which defeats the point of using an external IDE)

My OS is Windows 10, by the way.

Cheers,
John

[DDRM]

Hi John,

I suspect the issue is that .bbc files are tokenised (see "keyword tokens" and "program storage in memory" in the manual): the keywords are converted to 1 byte values. I think that is what the run-time engine expects, so if you send it a text file it doesn't know how to handle it. I guess your IDE would need to tokenise the program before passing it to the run-time engine - effectively run a "compiler" to generate "source code" for the run-time engine to execute. The tokens are listed in the manual, so it shouldn't be too difficult to write.

As Richard notes above, the SDL IDE is able to do this, and is written in BBC BASIC. so you could look there for how to go about it.

Unfortunately Richard is currently not posting on this forum: you could try contacting him directly by email to get more detailed guidance.

Best wishes,

D

[Orac]

Thanks for the info. I sort of suspected it would have something to do with tokenising. I'll take a look at the SDL tokeniser and see if I can come up with anything.