Towards a Visual FOCAL++ Language

[Ángel Martin]

Towards a Visual FOCAL++ Language: Formula Evaluation Relaunch

A new revision of the Formula Evaluation module is available. Besides the usual tweaks and enhancements to its previous functionality it now adds a new class of functions with a wider reach in scope and flexibility: the Conditional Structures.

Designed to work collaboratively, these functions provide a higher-level programming experience for program flow control based on general-purpose Boolean expressions, or according to variable pointers and markers. They go well beyond the "skip-line-if-false" simple rule featured in the ISG/DSE pair, and thus they open the door for a more visual programming on the HP-41 platform.

There are eleven functions grouped in four Conditional Structures:

DO-WHILE
IF/ELSE/ENDIF
FOR..NEXT
SELECT/CASE/CASELSE/ENDSLCT

The underpinnings of the implementation rely on system buffers that are available systemwide, and therefore are shared by several modules. This is facilitated by new value assignment and retrieval functions, such as: LET=, GET=, SHOW=, and SWAP=

For a case example check out this posting on the Ulam's Conjecture.

If you're intrigued then go ahead and download the attached updated manual.

Testing is complete -> MOD/ROM files are now attached/

P.S. I forgot abut the EVAL_APPS, the zip container has been updated with it now.