[Coco] MAS/EDT

David J Bush twixt at cstone.net
Sat Aug 7 08:52:14 EDT 2004


I finally realized there was no CoCo 320-pixel wide screen
display before the CoCo3. EDT used a 5x8 region for its
fonts plus spacing, so the display was just 51 columns across
on a 256H pixel screen, not 53. Sorry about the bad
information.

The MAS screen display of the listing did not use any special
fonts, so it was just 32 columns wide, and each line was up
to 80 characters long. Assembled screen output was definitely
difficult to read. But I'm very glad I still have a copy and
a manual. Just as one example of its power, here is some code
from the manual which generates no ML code, only messages to
the screen. It lists out a solution to the "Towers of Hanoi"
problem, given the number of disks on pole 1 at the start.
MAS can handle an input value up to 38, assuming the user
would last long enough to view the entire output:

MOVDISK  MACRO
         IFNE     |3
         MOVDISK  |0,|2,|1,|3-1
         MSG      "Move disk from |0 to |1"
         MOVDISK  |2,|1,|0,|3-1
         ENDC
         ENDM

NUMTODO  ASK      "Move how many disks?"
         MOVDISK  (pole 1),(pole 2),(pole 3),NUMTODO
         END

I could try to post MAS on the Net, if anyone is interested.
If anyone has EDT I would love to hear from you!

Thanks for your patience.






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