mhist.txt
-the history of m, the C99 precursor, and the answer to the question:
What happened to m2, m3, m4?
Well, m2 failed because I was really bothered by releasing
m1 while is was still unstable, so I kept working
on m1 until it reached about m1r6; and passed -Wall.
I forgot redoing m1 as m2 and decided to do a modular
m1 lookalike, m3. I still kept working on m1, however,
and polished it a bit until it reached m1r8; aka
m1r. I then decided I would stop counting (not that I have
difficulty counting past 8, It was a philisophical decision)
and just called m1, m1r. Coincidentally, I haven't worked on
it since, because I realise it's icky and I can do much better.
I realised that m1 was too silly to reverse engineer,
from what I'd learn doing/fixing it, I knew I'd like
to design it better, so I started fresh with m5;
taking things things like parser.c from the m3 directory.
What about m4? For some reason I left out m4. Maybe
to avoid misconstrument with that macro language.
But I did work on a C++ game with a funny lookign #kode
fellow (Leebert), and it's in a directory called m4.
Moving on...
m5 was/is going well, but rather slowly.
I had spent lots of time working on auxillary functions
whilst working on m3; so this time I tackled the "fun part":
rendering graphics. Characters were no porblem, but
sprites (to be more specific, Chip's Sprite Format) gave
me no end of trouble until one night Chip send me a little
QBasic program which loaded his sprite format and I Saw
The Light. Sorta. The code is very icky. ::shudder::
But is works well enough to stamp sprites to the screen.
Sometime in the near future I hope to get sprites moving as
entities, as in, "floating" above the background and, later on,
hiding behind it (which doesn't work now as the background
is opaque).
Also, I've recently (990321) forked to m6 in order to work
on the MM (mini monitor); which will mean a redesign and thus
recode of the parser and stuff (eventually).
However, I've digressed and am now spending more time ranting,
designing, and stuff than actual kode. Kodewise, I've worked on
several derivatives of tide (idetest.c), and now I've arrived
at pi/ty, an ide thingy which had a builin C-NASIC parser
as well... (i'm working on inporving this parser and looking
at tokenization/detokenization...).
I've decided to work on both C-NASIC and NASIC proper, or rather,
C-NASIC and a C64-type BASIC interpeter, missing only direct memory
access (SYS,POKE,PEEK(,USR(,WAIT).
C-NASIC is more like a compiled lanuage (or Verge Compiled Script...
see http://www.verge-rpg.com/ for more into on verge, but note that I'm
not involved in the project in any way, I just point and laugh at their
code, development model, and frames in web pages. Not that I'm any better,
I do less rather than do anything better than them), whilst this new
interpeter (basic2) will used embedded line numbers and a linked list
or some sort.. and multiple instructions per line. Very much like
a C64's BASIC.
Well, that's all for now. Hope you enjoyed this little file,
even if you didn't, I did, so, it's all good.
--] Addedem:-
Wednesday, June 02, 1999
9:59 PM
Okay, so, I'm working on m7 now.
I don't belive I'll increase the m number for a while to come,
because I'm using three-part version numbers and all sorts fo shit,
for example, IDE NT is at v2.1.0 ; Parse3.c is at 1.6.1; Parse3r2
(codenamed Second Impact) is
unversioned but it's an r2, and has a kool codename.
In order to support dimp2.c and related things (specifically, printing newline
characters); IDELIB had to be enhanced, and stuff.
My point is the m7 is where I'm likely to stay for a while
(note that most of my previous
predictions were surpassed by a better future,
the only things that really came true is
that m7 is orders of magnitude faster than the original m1,
which had great sloth...),
I'm working on several components of M7 in parallel,
and having great fun at it.
When will it be usable? It will never be.
When you see C99.exe on my page, then you
know things have reached a user ready stage. For now, if you're not a developer and/or
don't have an interst in C64ish things, then, there's nothing to see here.
Although, the documnetation is (IMHO) more amusing than my FAQen.
---:
What happened to m6?
When I started working on "2" of everthing (i.e. rendlib2, parse3r2),
I decided to fork
the kode once again. Forking gives me a cute little reference point
so that later on,
I can point and laugh at my kode. Keep in mind that this is my
first signifigant project in C, there was KC, but, that went bleck.
It'll be back, though, but I'm not
sure if in C, BASIC2, NASIC, or what.
---:
Why don't you write JAVA code? Did you not do this for a living?
JAVA is a lot of hype, and a lot of fun, but, I don't like it for
Realtime Interactive Simulations, which is ultimately what I'm interested in
(actually, right now I'm interested in avoiding bankrupcy, but, that's not
ultimate or even directly conencted to my reason for not coding in JAVA).
They are only two uses I can see for JAVA:
servers; which are very easy to write in JAVA and potentially
outperform unthreaded/unoptomised C servers
and RAD; that is, Rapid Application Development, like, if you wanted
to prototype a Windows or X11 or MacOS app for someone and needed
to whip something together -fast-.
I also suppose you could us natively compiled JAVA for final apps, but I have
very little interest in making apps for the mass market.
---:
Why don't you write Windows code?
This question has been temporarily directed to /dev/null
---:
When will C99.exe be released?
Gosh darn it, I heven't even started designing my implementation of the C99
concept. If you haven't grasped M's place in the C99 Project,
let me spell it out again:
M preceeds C99.
When all M have come,
and I have reached a higher level of kode,
then will C99 be
considered.
---:
What's new in M7?
This isn't the place to ask that, see m1.htm or something.
This is where I talk about what's old in M.
---:
Chip's Sprite Format
You know, for eons, there has been a whole big-endian vs. little-endian Jihad.
However, Chip has gone past these trivial arguments,
and reversed the order of the -bits- in his sprite format (.sp2).
I dub this Inverse Signifigance Bitfield Level Encoded Bytes,
which is an excessively long, unnice to pronounce acronym, but,
it gets the point across.
Anyhow, I think Chip deserves special mention for this.
It is indeed special of him.
Oh, and, did I mention he's special?
I'm sure Chip will continue to do impressive unique things...
---]
Additional notes:
Notez additonal:
rendlib3:
rendlib3 is Yet Another Militant Thing, in this case,
I'm re-implemeting the RENDLIB concept to be a bit more modular,
but more importantly, to include extensive sprite support
(actually, some sprite support is more accurate... but in comparison
to wiggle, it will be extensive!). Also, the usage of layers
and various speedups and whatnot will make this a fun thing to
do...
The whole project needs a more professional look to it,
I've really been neglecting it but I need to stop that
and ramp up the quality level...
---]
Last update:
Tuesday, July 06, 1999
9:35 PM
(
geocities.com/granitor)