what kind of fun trickery could you do with the vat data?

Do you mean you could just convert a PRGM to APPVAR, lock programs, hide them and even convert a string to a picture?

EDIT: or even rename them?

Hmm... I like the idea of having a command to return the VAT pointer, but it seems like it would be too low level to work with.  You would need to know all the equates to change the type for instance and know how that data structure looks in general to change anything.  Although it would be easy to add, I think it would just require too much assembly knowledge which is what I'm trying to avoid in this project.

If I ever do add it, it would be at the very end of the project where I just add a bunch of "undocumented" instructions (which actually are documented separately) but for assembly programmers who want to do some really low level stuff.

Nice idea Quigibo. Personally, once the project is nearly done, I would add those lower level commands, but warn the user that those commands are not necessary to make great Axe programs and they are just for people who got ASM knowledge or wants to go lower level. The main doc part needs to remain for higher level language programmers and as user-friendly as possible.

We also need to keep in mind about people who might accidentally mess things up very bad

@ztrumpet The [on] interrupt will come eventually.  But keep in mind that only protects you from infinite loops and NOT from writing data in the wrong places.  Also, it does not allow you to to use your own interrupts in this mode, however, you can still add quitting code in the custom interrupt yourself.


Well, I'm rewriting the way number parsing works.  I have to or else I can't implement some new optimizations.  I'm grouping every single routine that can possibly return a constant into a single read-number routine.  That includes Integers, Hex, Binary, Characters, Tokens(new), Pointers, and everything else.  The goal is to make all expressions that evaluate to constants be single constants, not just pointers.

Now, I ran into some really cool syntax problems.  I was going to include multiplication and division in these optimized routines which can really help sometimes.  For instance, when using *256 coordinates you can type 44*256 to make 44 the coordinate and Axe automatically multiplies this precompile time.  But then I realized there was a slight technical problem with doing this.  What if you typed A/2/2 to do faster division?  Axe would automatically optimize this to A/4 which although it is actually optimized in terms of size, it definitely isn't in terms of speed.

So, I think I will only optimize multiplication and division if the first number is a constant rather than if the first operation is a constant operation.  However, I will still optimize addition and subtraction both ways since you never have these problems with those operations becasue there's no speed loss from grouping individual operations.

This might take a while to re-code a bunch of routines to handle the new method, but I've already done the bulk of it and its turning out pretty good so far.

Nope.  Only size decreases

Cool!
I also like that they'll be a [On] interrupt eventually.   Thanks!

You need the prefix "v" in the Str1.

That means it should show this:

"vS"->Str1
The v is question is [2nd]+[8].