[Coco] DECB or ECB Compiler

[Roger Merchberger]

On 09/18/2010 08:16 PM, Little John wrote:
> Carlos,

[[ snippety on good info ]]

> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carlos Martins Nabeto"
> Subject: [Coco] DECB or ECB Compiler
>
>> Anybody knows if exists any DECB or ECB compiler?? If yes, is it
>> compatible with Expanded Color BASIC of CoCo3?

There was a very advanced system - I'm pretty sure it was a compiler - 
fpr the CoCo3; I believe it was called Window Basic 3 or WBasic3 -- 
memory cells are froggy right now... I remember drooling over it back in 
the day because it was kinda like Basic09 for SECB on Steroids...

The good features that I remember:

1) Line numbers not needed (but could be used when importing older programs)

2) It had built-in MMU support - so a DIM statement of an array too big 
to fit in 32K *worked* -- if you had 512K, you could DIMension almost 
all of the ram (minus program/video/etc. memory) for huge (for SECB) 
data support.

3) It had built-in basic Windowing support - you could create several 
different text windows & have different outputs to different windows -- 
I don't know if it had graphical capabilities; that's beyond my memory 
allocation** right now. (Where's that big DIM statement when I need it?)
;-)

** 12 hour day (with a 300 mile round trip) on 2 hours sleep...
    I think I have 2 functioning brain cells left, and they're not 
talking to each other right now. ;-)

Now for the bad news:

1) I don't believe it contained a "100% SECB compatible" mode. Depending 
on the complexity of the program you wanted to convert probably 
translated to the complexity of debugging session you would need to 
endure to convert a program to WBasic3. I think the "basics" were quite 
similar, but when you got into the graphics & whatnot, I think there was 
quite a bit that was different.

2) No CoCo1/2 support.

So, I doubt it would work with any of the 'clones' available in Brazil.

Anyway, if I get 'round to drumming up some time and finding my old 
Rainbows, I'll see if I can find an ad for it.

HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger