Subject:
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Re: BASIC for the NXT was Re: R21 - Robot Status
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Tue, 11 Jul 2006 21:46:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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977 times
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In lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto, Calum Tsang wrote:
> It is my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong) that the NBC today is an
> assembler which a compiler needs to pass object from C source to be linked to.
> This is of course an extremely important step and a welcome achievement. But I
> (and I would suspect a lot of rtlToronto folks as well as Lego enthusiasts in
> general) want the equivalent of NQC + RCXCC.
A NXT-C compiler which supports every NXT feature will not likely be done by
BrickFest. I hope to have a first cut with partial support for the NXT features
working within a couple weeks. My intent would be to incrementally add support
for all of the things you mentioned.
There are some major issues, though, to be considered. The NXT VM doesn't do
pointers or any indirect variable access like you find in the RCX. It supports
arrays so you can do things akin to pointers but it's not quite the same. It
also doesn't have anything like event monitoring, resource acquisition, or
direct control over starting and stopping other tasks. It also doesn't have any
notion of a stack for use with parameter passing (like what was added to the
Spybot firmware and supported in MindScript for the Spybot brick) or local
variables of any sort.
NBC is an assembly language, but it is really a LOT like programming in BASIC
without the built-in looping constructs and without infix operators. It will be
nice to have a high level language that fully supports all the NXT features and
which can be run from within a really nice IDE. Delivering such a product to
the LMS robotics community is my goal. But the fact is that right now you can
very easily write powerful programs in an IDE that at least a few people like
using with a language which is very simple to learn and which supports
essentially all the NXT features already.
John Hansen
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