- Comments 68k
- 09 Mar 2012 04:39:24 pm
- Last edited by TC01 on 09 Mar 2012 04:43:41 pm; edited 1 time in total
Anyone who has ever opened up GCC4TI or TIGCC will probably be familiar with this little snippet of 68k C:
Code:
I always fill these out when I create new projects, but recently I wondered: why am I bothering? I knew of no programs that could actually display this information: were there any? I would bet that most remaining 68k developers probably don't bother either.
After a few IRC conversations in #ti with Lionel, I learned that these "program comments" (as I always have referred to them) were part of the dextrefi specification designed by Kevin Kofler and others back in 2002. The idea was to store metadata in a data extension header for shells to be able to access and display. However, very few 68k file managers have ever implemented this specification.
My original idea was to add it to Memory Usage (which already sort of contains a file browser of its own). However, I realized that the small diagnostic program I had created to make sure I was accessing program comments correctly was worthy of it's own release.
And so that is why I am posting about "Comments", a simple little utility that, if passed the name of an assembly program as a command line argument, will check if that assembly program has a data extenison header, and if it does display associated metadata. Here are some screenshots of it running on itself:
It's available from Cemetech and has been uploaded to ticalc.org.
Code:
// Delete or comment out the items you do not need.
#define COMMENT_STRING "Place your comment here."
#define COMMENT_PROGRAM_NAME "Place your program name here."
#define COMMENT_VERSION_STRING "Place your version string here."
#define COMMENT_VERSION_NUMBER 0,0,0,0 /* major, minor, revision, subrevision */
#define COMMENT_AUTHORS "Place your author name(s) here."I always fill these out when I create new projects, but recently I wondered: why am I bothering? I knew of no programs that could actually display this information: were there any? I would bet that most remaining 68k developers probably don't bother either.
After a few IRC conversations in #ti with Lionel, I learned that these "program comments" (as I always have referred to them) were part of the dextrefi specification designed by Kevin Kofler and others back in 2002. The idea was to store metadata in a data extension header for shells to be able to access and display. However, very few 68k file managers have ever implemented this specification.
My original idea was to add it to Memory Usage (which already sort of contains a file browser of its own). However, I realized that the small diagnostic program I had created to make sure I was accessing program comments correctly was worthy of it's own release.
And so that is why I am posting about "Comments", a simple little utility that, if passed the name of an assembly program as a command line argument, will check if that assembly program has a data extenison header, and if it does display associated metadata. Here are some screenshots of it running on itself:
It's available from Cemetech and has been uploaded to ticalc.org.
