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DELETED · Post by **DELETED** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 2:50 am

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Mike · Post by **Mike** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 2:58 am

Gary_Leeds · Post by **Gary_Leeds** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:30 am

Most decent text editors seem to have a convert to lower case option, anyone still using only notepad is stuck in the past

edited to remove converted code

Post by **Jeff-20** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:34 am

Mike wrote:No.

Mike · Post by **Mike** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 3:37 am

Gary_Leeds wrote:Most decent text editors seem to have a convert to lower case option, anyone still using only notepad is stuck in the past

That point could be stated without quoting my code.

Anyway, this topic has come up before. I do not intend to support a buggy feature of VICE. And brighty also didn't have any problems using my first two examples.

Michael

DELETED · Post by **DELETED** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 4:07 am

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Mike · Post by **Mike** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 4:29 am

MRaider wrote:If you don't want your code quoted, why bother posting it here? It's not like Gary fundamentally changed it in any way, or implied it was his code - it was pretty obvious it was yours. All he'd done was re-post it in lower-case.

Which slightly missed the point. It's a trivial text transformation, that everyone so inclined to can do himself. So, why quote it?

However, VICE has a paste option. Buggy or not, it exists, and is useful. Saying you're not going to support it, when supporting it entails nothing more than posting your code in lower-case, seems churlish.

When working code is posted in the forum, I think 99,9% is done. After all, there's one who spent the time writing the code, and getting it right. Getting it into the system, be it a VIC-20, or VICE is entirely at the recipients business.

Especially when the request is politely made, and your response is (initially) a curt one-word answer.

Needless to say, you do yourself no favours in adopting such an intolerant and high-handed attitude.

I have no reason to apologize about something essentially done as spare-time activity.

Gary_Leeds · Post by **Gary_Leeds** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 7:05 am

Michael,

I apologise if I upset you by quoting your code, I have edited my post to remove it to avoid any more problems.

One thing that does puzzle me though is the comment about the buggyness of the VICE converter and cut and paste option. If VICE was to convert all upper case to lower case automatically then surely that removes all means of entering in graphics (the shifted letter ones anyway) quickly into code? In some respects VICE has it right in everything being entered unshifted as thats how you would enter it on a real Vic20. Please dont take this as any criticism towards yourself. Im not looking to start a flame war or anything, I must admit I am a bit like that myself when programming, I refuse to work round other peoples work when they have got it in my mind wrong

Gary

Mike · Post by **Mike** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 8:55 am

Hi, Gary,

I didn't get upset, when you quoted my code. I only found it unnecessary in that case, as the only alteration was to put it in all-lower case, something which MRaider easily could have done himself.

Gary_Leeds wrote:One thing that does puzzle me though is the comment about the buggyness of the VICE converter and cut and paste option.

Yes, in some cases VICE also mangles over-length lines. And the export of C= graphic characters doesn't work at all.

If VICE was to convert all upper case to lower case automatically then surely that removes all means of entering in graphics (the shifted letter ones anyway) quickly into code?

Long before VICE was equipped with that cut&paste feature, I already needed some way to get my cross-developed programs into VICE. Of course ASCII, and PETSCII are different, and so one must use some scheme to quote non-ASCII characters of PETSCII.

At least the upper case characters, numbers, and the most important interpunctation symbols do share the same code number in ASCII, and PETSCII; that also means they display the same on a PC, and the VIC. I use the following hosted 4-line program to tokenize code:

Code: Select all

63996 POKE812,238:OPEN2,8,2,"TEXT.TXT,P,R" 
63997 PRINT"{CLR}";:IFST<>0THENPOKE812,239:CLOSE2:END 
63998 GET#2,A$:PRINTA$;:IFA$<>CHR$(13)THEN63998 
63999 PRINT"GOTO63997":POKE631,19:POKE632,13:POKE633,13:POKE198,3

You might take a look at here for a short explanation. This program however does indeed not work with quoted characters.

In the other direction I had written a C program which transfers from PETSCII to ASCII using upper case characters, and {} for quotation, with a provision to count repeated quoted chars (so that {DOWN}{DOWN}{DOWN}{DOWN}{RIGHT} is written as {4 DOWN,RIGHT}). Thus far I didn't write the corresponding program to do the reverse, so that true PETSCII could be fed to the 4-liner above.

Please dont take this as any criticism towards yourself. Im not looking to start a flame war or anything, ...

Neither do I.

... I must admit I am a bit like that myself when programming, I refuse to work round other peoples work when they have got it in my mind wrong.

Concerning this very topic about transferring data from the 'net to VICE (or the VIC-20), in one particular case all my helpfulness led nowhere, and I earned some harsh remarks. This is why I decided to take this position:

Mike wrote:Getting [the working code] into the system, be it a VIC-20, or VICE is entirely at the recipients business.

And bigger programs, or BASIC with lots of special chars, I now put in my web space.

If there are no objections, I'd rather move this part of the topic, beginning with MRaider's remark, into a new thread in the General Topics section. This could then be the start to devise a FAQ for this topic.

Greetings,

Michael

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Sat Apr 11, 2009 10:05 am

You could always use something like Convert Case. There really is a web-based tool for every problem.

orion70 · Post by **orion70** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 11:18 am

Or copy-paste in MS word, select all and SHIFT+F3. There's also a specific menu voice in the Open Office word processor to convert in upper or lower case.

DELETED · Post by **DELETED** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:00 pm

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Mike · Post by **Mike** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 5:18 pm

MRaider wrote:... because with the exception of a few edge conditions, VICE can accept lower-case code pasted into it directly.

Using control characters in a BASIC program is hardly an edge condition.

For an example: this is, what happens, when I load Meteor Storm into VICE 2.1, export it, and then re-chain the lines:

Code: Select all

1 print"S.":data,,,,,,,,24,60,60,24,153,255,255,153,56,110,255,251,127,222,252,56
2 poke56,28:clr:poke36879,14:fort=0to23:reada:poke7424+t,a:next:poke36869,255:a=8174
3 pokeint(rnd(1)*330)+7702,34:geta$:a=a+(a$="z"anda>8164)-(a$="c"anda<8185):sc=sc+1
4 print".."sc"..]"chr$(148):ifpeek(a)<>34thenpokea,33:poke218,peek(218)or128:goto3

Unfortunately, the control characters have been replaced by placeholders.

Pasting the listing back into VICE won't reconstruct the original program.

And the listing also doesn't serve the purpose of human readable documentation, since information is irretrievably lost.

DELETED · Post by **DELETED** » Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:24 am

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Mike · Post by **Mike** » Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:09 am

MRaider wrote:That is an edge condition, because it's not something you'd commonly do as a matter of course, and not what we're talking about here.

If you're judging from the listings I've posted here to date, it might be interesting to you, that I've actually refrained from posting lots of my code just because it contains lots of control characters. That is, until I recently allocated some web space.

I code ?chr$(147) instead of trying to embed the character code itself.

Nothing wrong with that. It could even be regarded as personal style. But {PI} could not be embedded that way. Unless you define a variable, like PI=4.0*ATN(1.0).

Now if VICE could parse that and convert it into the single-byte control character, that would be very slick.

It also could use quoted characters in curly braces like the convention I've adopted. The curly braces do have the advantage, that they are no part of PETSCII, thus can savely be used to embed quoted characters, like:

{<-}, {SHIFT-S}, {2 DOWN}, {CLR}, etc.

In a related matter, I really don't know what has ridden the VICE developer team to use ankle braces for this in petcat. What happens when I actually want to embed the character string '<DOWN>' (these 6 characters, not the control char), into a program?

It doesn't do that, of course, preferring to parse shifted (upper-case) characters as control codes.

VICE doesn't even do that. It instead puts the shifted graphic symbols there. And the character ']' in my example even gets replaced by a vertical bar '|' {SHIFT--} when I paste the - already corrupted - listing back to VICE! Just to say that it originally had been a {LEFT} control char.

In my opinion, the copy&paste feature has only recently been kludged into VICE. While I appreciate the efforts the developers have put into this project as whole, they still should have tested this new feature before releasing it into the wild.