[Coco] D(S)ECB Question

[Darren A]

You can use the ,R option with the MERGE command to run the program
from the beginning after merging in the new portion.  You will lose
all variable values unless you take extraordinary steps to preserve
them. Since the progam portions that need to be merged must be stored
in ASCII, you will have to determine if the size of those portions
would result in any significant amount of disk space savings as
opposed to just using RUN to load separate versions of the entire
program.

Darren

-------
On 9/29/08, Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu> wrote:
> My memory is somewhat hazy on this, but I think the MERGE command will stop
> execution of your program, so that RUN <line number> will need to be typed
> after
> the merge takes place to have it continue where you left off.  Or GOTO <line
> number>.  Either way, you'll lose all the variable values, I think, except
> those
> you've poked into memory somewhere and retrieve by PEEKing.  Also, I believe
> the
> program you're merging must be in ASCII Basic format, which means that it
> may
> load pretty slowly, if it is long.
>
> A better approach might be to use the RUN<filename> command to load in
> whichever
> of the subprograms you want based on the outcome of an IF statement, having
> first poked into memory whatever variable values you want the subprogram to
> have
> access to.  When you need to return to the main program, include a statement
> in
> the subprogram that runs the filename of the main program, etc.  If this
> slows
> things down too much from all the disk accesses, consider including a
> Ramdisk
> utility so that your programs have to be loaded from physical disk only
> once,
> and can be quickly swapped in and out from Ramdisk storage thereafter.  That
> would require a 512K CoCo 3 for the Ramdisk, and that your program confine
> itself to 128K.
>
> It is also possible to have your programs poke in new values for the
> pointers
> that Basic uses for the start and end of variable and array storage, which
> would
> allow both programs to access the same variable values, if you work things
> just
> right.
>
> Art
>
> On Mon, 29 Sep 2008, CoCo Mongrel wrote:
>
>> Answering my own question...  Duh!  The MERGE command is what I was
>> looking
>> for.
>>
>> cocomongrel
>>
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