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In lugnet.robotics, Mario Beaulieu wrote:
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Wow! I’ve just discovered Bricxcc! Thank you very much for providing such a
useful tool. I’m using PbForth and I was impressed by what you’ve included in
BricxCC. Just to share with you, here’s what I did so far. I’ve renamed the
Help file so I can use the Forth Help file from the program. Maybe I did
something wrong though because I can’t generate the words index. But it’s not
a big deal. Also, once I download the firmware, the USB tower doesn’t respond
from the console. I found a workaround though. I click on the Connect button
and I hit Enter alternatively a few quick times and suddenly it works. After
that, it’s just perfect. I really like the fact that I can pick the color
for different groups of words. You know what would be great? Since PbForth
uses almost only words in capital letters, and since BricxCC recognises the
words, there could be an option to upshit forth words automatically. Wow!
After such a great tool, here I am asking for more...
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Unfortunately I haven’t documented my pbForth support very well. Perhaps the
following explanation will be useful to all BricxCC users who want to try
pbForth.
BricxCC figures out some things based on the extension of the file open in the
currently active editor window. This may not be the best approach in the world.
But it works fairly well.
If you open a file with .4th, .f, .fr, or .fth as the file extension then
BricxCC will switch its help system to use a file in the help subdirectory
called pbforth.hlp. Then when you select Help/Contents or Help/Index you should
see help information about pbforth. The contents page should list pbForth Words
and pbForth Tutorial as “books” you can open. Also, from within an active
editor window containing a pbForth file (based on the aforementioned file
extensions) you can use Ctrl+F1 or F1 (depending on how your editor keystrokes
are configured) to get context help on the token at the cursor location. This
works just the same as it does when you have an NQC file, a LASM or Mindscript
file, or a brickOS or LeJOS file open in an editor window. The context help
doesn’t work from the pbForth console window.
You can also press Ctrl+Space (configurable via the Preferences dialog, Options
page) to display a “code completion” window listing all the pbForth words. This
code completion feature works in both the pbForth console window and any active
editor window containing pbForth code (again, based on the file extension).
pbForth support also includes the “Procedure List” feature and the “Code
Explorer” feature when you have an active editor window containing pbForth code.
The Procedure List is accessed via Ctrl+Shift+G in the current release.
Regarding the console and downloading the firmware, the disconnecting the
console is necessary since it uses a completely separate communication mechanism
than the rest of BricxCC. You can tell the console is connected by the state of
the Connect button. If the LED is on and the button appears to be pressed then
the console is connected. If the LED is off and the button does not appear to
be pressed then the console is not connected. Simply press the Connect button
to re-establish the console connection to the RCX. Anytime you use the console
to communicate with the RCX it will close the “normal” BricxCC connection. When
you close the console it will try to reopen the “normal” BricxCC connection.
Regarding the uppercasing of known forth words automatically, there is already a
mechanism for doing something along those lines. If you use code completion
(Ctrl-Space) and type a few characters of the word name you will see the list of
words in the code completion window become filtered by the characters you have
typed. If, for instance, you type Ctrl+Spacedepth you will see the pbForth
word DEPTH highlighted as the only item in the code completion window. Pressing
Enter at this point will replace the “depth” you typed in either the console or
the editor window with “DEPTH”. I don’t anticipate adding some other mechanism
for automatically uppercasing words as you type them in the editor window or the
console.
I would highly recommend changing the name of the help file back to pbforth.hlp
and access it as I have described above. Let me know if this helps explain
things a bit better. And if you have any more questions or problems (or praise)
feel free to post here or email me. :-)
John Hansen
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: BricxCC release 3.3.7.6
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| (...) Thanks! It does work well! My files had a .txt extension. But since I've renamed them, it works beautiful. (...) Very impressive and useful features. (...) Now I get it! (...) You're right (...) I renamed the help files back and it's great (...) (21 years ago, 12-Dec-03, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth, FTX)
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