foro.speccy.org

4. THINGS

I am led to believe that THINGS are so named because Tony Tebby and Jonathan Oakley couldn't think of another name for them so thay ended up discussing 'those things that you wrote yesterday' etc and the name stuck - THINGS they are then.

Things are implemented to allow tasks to communicate with each other. For example, Digital Precision's TURBO compiler uses a THING like method to pass information from the PARSER task to the CODEGEN task.

The PARSER runs and if there are no errors, leaves information hanging about in the QL's memory for the CODEGEN task to read and use to produce the compiled code. How on earth does the second task know where the first task left the information ?

TURBO picks up its information from a system variable, I believe, and so the CODEGEN task knows where the PARSER left the information. THINGS work in a similar manner, but there is a slight difference.

THINGS can have all sorts of uses, they can be executable things, extension things and all sorts of other things (!)

Probably the most used example of THINGS would be Jochen Merz's QMENU package. This is implemented as a series of extension THINGS, ie, THINGS that act like an extension. This basically means that as far as SuperBasic is concerned, they are just another toolkit, but with subtle differences.

The advantage of a THING is that they can be used by almost any program in the QL. Using QMENU as an example, I can write a SuperBasic program that uses them, a C68 program that uses them or an assembler program that uses them. They all use the same copy of the extensions and can find them in the system without the user knowing where they live.

For those who may have used QMENU but were unaware of it, the file is called MENU_REXT and is responsible for many PE programs having a very similar method of selecting a filename to load or save etc. There are other extensions included in MENU_REXT, but I will not labour the point here.

So that is the basic background to the PE. Next, I will dive in and try to explain what all those technical terms that get mentioned in manuals are about.

... THINGS are so named because Tony Tebby and Jonathan Oakley couldn't think of another name ...

Tony Tebby es de sobra conocido, pero ¿quién es ese tipo llamado "Jonathan Oakley"?

badaman escribió: ... escribió también parte de PE, concretamente el sistema "things" y PTR_GEN, también QPAC1 y posiblemente tambien escribió QRAM ...