Assembler/ Editor...... A NON-TUTORIAL
By Charles Bachand
One of the editors called me, quite unexpectedly the other day. "Hi, this is Lee", he said. "I just came up with a
great idea for an article that you can write for the next issue. How 'bout a tutorial on the new Assembler/Editor
cartridge?" Now, I hate to even read tutorial articles, let alone write them, but I kept listening anyway. "Oh, and by
the way", he said as he baited his trap, "when the article is finished, I will let you borrow my video tape copy of
FLASH GORDON That did it. I had to turn out some kind of tutorial article. Even though I hate tutorials, I was
being forced to submit one for publication. After all, how long could it possibly take to write one little tutorial? It
shouldn't take more than five or six double spaced sheets of paper, maybe a week to ten days at the most. "When
do you need this finished?", I asked, not expecting the answer that followed. "I need this article by Friday", was his
reply. He couldn't mean this Friday? This Friday was only three days away. "That's this Friday", he reiterated. My
worst fears about Lee's mental stability had been confirmed. He had lost his mind!
Since I missed "FLASH GORDON" when it was playing at the theater, giving Lee the benefit of the doubt seemed the safest thing to do. After all, a person writing a tutorial has three choices. He can write a tutorial, or he can write about something else and call it a tutorial (hoping that a certain person, in his crazed state will not notice), or he can do a little of both, like I am doing. I just don't want to bore myself when I have to read this later, checking the spelling, etc.
This is a good time as any to put in a word about writing articles for A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine. We need you to share your ideas with the rest of us ATARI owners. People are always complaining that they can just type into their computers. It is really your own fault. Half the enjoyment of writing a ,(game" program, for example, is knowing that other people are enjoying your work right along with you. And when it is printed in a magazine, thousands can join in the fun too. Now I do have a selfish reason for telling you all this. The more people who write articles and submit programs, the less I have to do, and I can get down to the business of writing terrific game programs.
The Assembler /Editor cartridge which was released only a few months ago, is a much needed accessory, useful by those who are serious about writing compact and efficient programs. It was a long time in coming, since the cartridge was ready almost a year before the documentation. ATARI decided to wait until the manual was ready before releasing the ROM. The people who created this program managed to get a lot of features in the 8K memory space they had to work with. There are three separate sections or the Assembler/Editor.
The Editor, is an enhanced version of the screen editor built into the ATARI personality module. Besides the regular edit features of the cursor positioning and character-line insertion and deletion, it also contains commands to renumber lines (the line numbering increments at a specified interval), so if the line numbers originally were 10, 12, 13, 22, then typing REN would produce line numbers of the sequence 10, 20, 30, 40. Besides deleting a line by typing it's line number, you can now delete a group of lines in a program by typing DEL XX, YY. If you want to erase all the lines in a program between 300 and 450 inclusive, all you would have to do is DEL 300, 450.
Did you ever get bored of typing the line numbers of the program in, especially when they are set up in a numerical sequence? Did you ever wish that the machine could do it for you? Well, get out your whistles and party hats, the Assembler/Editor can do it all for you! After you type in the statement NUM, the editor will come up with the line numbers after every return you type in. You enter the statements. The computer does the rest. Oh, I wish that a few of these features had been implemented in ATARI BASIC.
We now come to the two string type commands that someone was thoughtful enough to include in the editor. The first is FIND. This command is used to find a specified string in a program. For example, let's say we want to find the string "START". Just type in 'FIND/START/,' and the first occurrence of this string will be listed. More than likely, you want to list all occurrences of the string that you are looking for. just append an 'A', to the command so that it becomes 'FIND/START/,A' and the machine will list all the lines which contain the string "START" to the screen. You can even specify line delimiters, listing all lines between line X and line Y that have the string. During all of this, I have been using the character "/" as a delimiter. In reality, any character except a space, tab, and return can be used. And if the string you are searching for contains the character "/", you will have to use something else. FIND./2.,A is legal. Here "." was used instead of "/", because the string contained a "/". FIND?/2?,A is also legal. It sure beats looking through a 500 line program listing for a few spelling errors.