AltME groups: search

Like a style I guess.

my-address pulls in the data from the fields in the CRM, same with 
signature etc.

Diagnoses&medications generates a LaTeX two column table.  Body is 
the text that we have written.

\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{letter}

%frenchspacing
\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\address{Upper Hutt Health Centre\\P.O. Box 40-044\\Upper Hutt\\
\\tel: 04 920-1800\\
fax: 04 920-1808}

\date{1-Apr-2005}
\signature{Dr Graham Chiu}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{Dr CP ANYON\\
Ropata Village Medical Centre\\577 High Street\\
Lower Hutt, }
\opening{Dear Dr Anyon,}

\begin{quote}
\begin{tabular} {ll}
Cap. James Tiberius \textbf{Kirk} Dob: 22-Mar-2233& \\
Captain's Quarters, Starship Enterprise& \\
\end{tabular}
\end{quote}\begin{quote}
\begin{tabular} {ll}

\textbf{Diagnoses}&\textbf{Medications}\\Prolonged posttraumatic 
stress disorder&Methotrexate 12.5 mg Mondays only\\Other specified 
parasitic infections&Folic Acid 1 mg daily except Mondays\\ &Fosamax 
70 mg Tuesdays only\\
\end{tabular}
\end{quote}
James needs a new hip!
\closing{Best Regards,}

\end{letter}

\end{document}

You worked as a spaceship-doctor? :)

I understand you want a preprocesor for that :)

Yeah .. I worked for Star Fleet a long time ago.

I am not familiar with tex..


but the fist line of your output has a word 'letter' in it...could 
that be the cause of it?

Letter is the class of document ie. it should not be specifying the 
page size.  Others in this class include article, report, book, slides. 
 It could be a problem but I don't know enough about it.

LaTeX is a macro package for TeX.  Some guy wrote pdflatex to output 
LaTeX to PDF instead of DVI.  That was for his doctoral thesis.  
Such is the nature of freeware.

Is it better than straight from REBOL to PDF?  I would have to say 
yes.  make-pdf gives you ultimate control over the page, but only 
for one page ie. you know the page layout already.   It is set up 
more like a desktop design package, whereas LaTeX to PDF is much 
more in the same spirit as make-doc.

It would be great once these hooks have something to catch onto. 
 At the moment, I do not know of a way to flow text from one box 
to one on another page without tedious line counting.  In the meantime, 
I need professionally typeset text now ...

BTW, the split-text function we worked on in the parse channel would 
be useful for counting lines.  All we need now is a hyphenation dictionary 
:)

I want to do a PDF emitter for MD2... i've just been too busy lately. 
hope to get back to this soon.

Would you have enough time to answer a lot silly questions? I forgot 
the whole api and everything, but could do the coding.

A direct interpreter, or I guess a tokenized interpreter using the 
original opcodes as tokens, which amounts to the same thing. Interesting. 
I suppose that would be simplest way to do it, and a threaded interpreter 
would be a little hard in rebcode because of the relative branches. 
Good job!

yeah it was a sample, my code is a little more complex

Are all opcodes distinguishable by a single byte, or do you have 
a more complex instruction decoding process?

Several branches for every instruction, but probably optimizable 
on a special-case basis. Definitely slower than compiled rebcode, 
but much less complex and without the compiler overhead, so perhaps 
not that much slower. Much more compatible with self-modifying code. 
Also likely more compatible with JIT-compiled rebcode when that happens. 
Some code-generation on your interpreter, but mostly hand-coded. 
Overall, nice.

Your VM is single-instance right now, but that won't be a problem 
until R3's threading. For now, multiple interpreters can be in different 
REBOL processes. I don't know enough about what you are interpreting 
to know whether that matters :)

Probably not, then. You might want to wrap this all in a context 
statement to capture the global variables you're using.

currently i'm looking for a good implementation of DDA opcode (Decimal 
adjust for BDC numbers)

i found one that uses a look-up table of 4096 entries... little big

so, this instruction is used to addapt the result in a bcd form

DDA operates on a per-byte basis?

DAA instead of DDA (made a mispell)

it sets a flag which we calls carry (like the T flag in rebcode)

I would think a pickz on a 256-byte binary would do for a lookup 
table, putting a flag value in the invalid slots. Then you could 
react to the flag afterwards.

yes but it's a little more difficult

DAA react diffenrently after an addition or a cubstraction

** Script Error: Out of range or past end
** Where: f
** Near: pickz a b 10

Not for what I was thinking. I was trying a multistep process where 
the need for the next step is determined by whether the pick of the 
earlier succeeded. I suppose the same could be accomplished by math, 
but a pick would have allowed smaller lookup tables.

How does the DAA react differently after an add or a sub? Could you 
simplify things by combining the add/sub and the daa into a larger 
logical opcode? It occured to me, looking at your code earlier, that 
you could combine strings of opcodes that didn't include writes to 
memory into larger virtual opcodes, to cut down on interpreter overhead 
when not necessary.

Z80 just remember if the last math operation was an add or a substract

yes a flag, but this flag is not visible

so in rebcode , i will have to manage this trick by myself, with 
seting my own DaaFlag after a sub or an add

I'm curious as to what the effect really is. Perhaps a positive/negative 
issue?

So, it looks like 3 flags, one of which may be set afterwards, and 
some ranges. Either that means some really interesting math, or a 
4096 byte lookup table :(

yep it's a possibility

No need to follow CPU internal execution patterns when you aren't 
a real CPU.

It would require a more complex state machine, but since you wouldn't 
be starting over with every opcode it would execute less tests and 
branches per step than not combining. Think of combining opcodes 
as a kind of loop unrolling.

so in fact it could be performed by a static analyse of the code 
before ther real execution, and will result in addition of new byte-opcodes.

Perhaps you could specify your operations in a table and then go 
through it with a dialect processor like BURG - REBOL is good at 
that sort of thing. Then you could generate your interpreter from 
that table.

No, BURG is a tool used to generate backends for compilers from a 
processor specification dialect.

It's for compilers written in C. I think you could do something like 
BURG in a few lines of REBOL though :)

or you could add a a ReBurg function in the Rebol VM , to do that 
in my place :-)

Your generator would probably act a lot more like a peephole optimizer.

Few of the groups are. If I had to guess, it would be to avoid the 
reputation of vaporware. It has been a while since they have done 
a version of REBOL with rebcode, and it had some significant shortcomings. 
There may be no reason, though.

Yeah, rebcode just cuts down on interpreter overhead, but since its 
operations are a bit lower-level they aren't necessarily as fast. 
For simple operations it can be much faster, but natives are just 
that, optimized native code.

could the T flag be set after a locial operation like AND ?

very usefull to test if a bit is set

*after a logical operation

It sets the T flag based on the contents of a variable. I think it 
sets T to false if the var has 0, none or false, and sets T to true 
otherwise.

Try it. My memory of the behavior of SETT on 0 is a little sparse.

It would be faster than a compare.

i use 3 instructions to test a bit in all cases

anyway it's not really a problem, i never perform such tests

but you see, the 8bit registers are often combined into 16bits registers, 
so i should perform AND 255 before to translate them into 16 bit, 
i'm not sure  there is a real gain

That combination of 8-bit values into 16-bit registers has got to 
be a common code pattern. Are the 16-bit operations distinct from 
the 8-bit ones? This is the kind of code pattern that you could combine 
and optimize. Internally, do you need to have the 16-bit registers 
be a combination of the 8, or could they be seperate and have their 
values transfered over if it would be faster?

Need there be a difference?

I would have to read your Z80 manual to be sure, but it seems to 
me that these 16-bit operations seem to be great candidates for opcode 
combining. It may even be a good idea to have the 16-bit registers 
be seperate variables internally.

At the very least you should have seperate macros for 16-bit reads 
from and writes to memory, rather than a combination of 8-bit ops.

moreover , i'm not that writing/reading  a word in memory is more 
faster than to write/read 1 byte 2 times

to write a word, u need to use change

and you need to build a binary data

u can not just write a 16 bit value like that

I wonder if there would be a fast way to cache the 16-bit values 
in _HL, _BC and such, and writing them quickly.

but that will be a problem to perform math operation on them

If you poke a value over 255 into a string/binary, the upper bytes 
may be ignored rather that triggering an overflow error. Test that.

could be a usefull trick if it works

That provides a way to optimize the 16-bit load/store ops, particularly 
if there are 16-bit registers.

You could invalidate the affected 16-bit register if you use an 8-bit 
op, or perhaps combine 2 8-bit load/stores that would add up to a 
16-bit load/store into their 16-bit operation.

if _bc is handle as a 16 bit value, i need to do:
pokez mem adr _bc
add.i adr 1
rotr _bc 8
pokez mem adr _bc
rotl _bc 8

Is the Z80 a strict load/store architecture, or do they have other 
operations that can reference memory?

finally i'm not sure that it's a good idea to separate them

but we would have a gain when performing operations between 16 bits 
registers

in C it will not be a problem, 8 bits registers and 16 bits registers 
will share the same space adressing.

More time than the combination of a load to a register and an add 
from that register?

How many bytes in a load from memory? I suppose on the addressing 
mode...

What happens if you EXT8 a value that already has data in the higher 
bytes? I'm guessing it will just overwrite that data...

it is A

_a in my source

but most of instructions act on A

Well, there is no reason to change that balance - the code expects 
it. 16-bit operations can be sped up using a few tricks if necessary, 
like temporary registers that are used internally. You can even name 
those registers _bc, _de and _hl if you like :)

I thought of that, except in my head it was a second set of BRAB 
blocks :)

I was thinking vectors and opcodes to handle the struct! type, but 
a swap instruction would be nice too.

I would love a REBOL native swap instruction that worked like block 
set, but we all have dreams :)

Steeve <BTW, why rebcode thread is not on rebol.net ?>

Technically, it is because the group's description does not have 
"[web-pubiic]" in it.....Add that text to the description, and the 
last 300 messages will be on REBOL.net in around 10 minutes.
***

I suspect no one did that either for the reason BrianH suggests, 
or because no one has thought to do it.

I don't see any reason why it should not be a [web-public] group, 
but I'll leave the changing of the group description to the active 
participants. (hint: right-click the group name in the left-hand 
side list of groups)

2 bugs found: poke doesn't work with tuples and when we poke an image 
with a  RGB tuple value , RGB channels are mixed in a strange manner.

hey, what about a 6502 emulator ??

it probably can, if rebcode is allowed to write straight to a display 
buffer rather than through View.

i removed some debug instructions, it's a little more faster now. 
Don't forget i have to rewrite the video emulation too. So it will 
be definitivly faster (i hope).

I ran it through remote desktop on Windows via OSX. speed was a little 
slow, but ok

speed improvement of http://perso.orange.fr/rebol/galaga.r

all video routines have been translated into rebcode, but it' s not 
so fast than in my dreams.

- Added a button to switch Draw randering between bilinear and nearest

i must add a trick to negociate the good frame rate

The good work is to find a nice little open-source audio library 
for playing samples and try to integrate it into rebol.

i think if i let the sound like that, RT peoples  will have a headhash 
and will implement a correct sound port  soon.

so , i will add a mute button

The source for Media Player Classic has a lot of good source, as 
does ffdshow.

Sorry, the source _site_ has a lot of good source _code_ :)

um.. I had a bad vibe about portAudio, I think.