[Simh] PDP8, Adventure, and SIMH

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-04-04 03:41, Rick Murphy wrote:
> At 07:28 PM 4/3/2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> However, DIR is not a KBM command, but is something done by CCL.
>> Unless I'm really confused...
>
> The thing giving you the "." prompt and reading the response is the
> Keyboard Monitor. It handles simple commands like "ASSIGN", "DEAS",
> "GET", "ODT", "R", "RUN", "SAVE", "START", and hands anything else off
> to CCL using the command line that KBM read. User input is uppercased
> before it's stashed into the input buffer.
>
> With the patch, you can use lowercase much of the time in OS/8 but lots
> of CUSPs aren't lowercase tolerant.

Uh. Are we talking about two different things here?
KBM does not convert lowercase to uppercase. That's why commands like 
"SAVE" fails if you type it in lowercase...
CCL get lowercase input. If you want to handle it, you convert it to 
uppercase yourself, KBM don't do it.
It might be that USR would convert lowercase to uppercase. I can't 
remember that one... However, since USR encodes the input anyway, it 
should not make a difference for the programs. So I'm not sure what you 
are referring to with the comment about that patch...

See ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp8/os8/utils/cclx for a version of CCL 
which do case conversion. cclx4.pa holds the code that converts the 
lowercase to uppercase for the input. cclx5.pa actually manages the 
built-in KBM commands. (If they got to CCL, it means they must have been 
entered in lowercase, which KBM don't catch, so CCL gives you a nice 
error message about you need to input those commands in uppercase in 
this case.)

CCLX is a much nicer CCL than what DEC provided with OS/8, I'd recommend 
it for anyone who use OS/8.

Oh, and actually reading through CCLX made me remember that the plain 
CCL probably don't handle lowercase either, which would explain why Bob 
got an error while giving the command "dir". :-)

It's been way too long since I played seriously with all this, so my 
memory is not always trustworthy. I need to recheck things when I reply, 
which I don't always do. So errors in small details are likely to sneak 
in to my replies...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol