.pl66
Tabspace utility for
CP/M-80 Kermit (Kermit-80) support.
I have written this utilty simply to help me.
No other excuses.
I am forever getting updates or new systems to add to the CP/M-80
version of Kermit (Kermit-80) from folk who send me these updates
via Electronic Mail.
I am thankful that it is already in a
machine readable form.
However, our Mutton-head mainframe substitutes a single space
character for every tab character it receives, so a lot of the
submissions need considerable massaging before I can actually
merge these additions to the rest of Kermit-80.
Therefore, I issued Kermit-80 with all tabs replaced by spaces,
in the hope that any further doantions have spaces instead of
tabs.
Unfortunately, this does not work in practice, and
everyone is complaining about the size of the source files (often
as much as 30% larger as a single tab character is now up to
eight space characters!)
So I wrote this program in the hope that people submitting stuff
to me run their sources through this de-tabber to make my life
easier.
As a bonus, TABSAPACE will do the reverse, and replace
with tabs. With a couple of exceptions... (See below)
spaces
To run the program, type TABSPACE and wait for the sign-on
message
("Tabspace loaded, Version 1 22-Jan-87"
for the time
being). Tabspace will ask for the filename to be "massaged", and
whether you want to expand or compress files (ie substitute
spaces for tabs, or tabs for spaces respectively).
Once started, it will plough through the file specified (if
exists) and apply the tabs/spaces replacement as required.
will also strip out any parity bits.
it
It
Tabspace actually opens two files when it works: one input file
of the type <filename>.<extention> as specified by you.
The
second is the same <filename> but with a $$$ extention.
Once the file has been massaged, the original file will be
deleted, and the .$$$ file renamed to your original file.
This
should be relatively safe, as you will not get to the stage of
delete and rename if you have disk space or file closing
problem.
However, I suggest you try applying Tabspace to COPIES
of your software!
Couple of other points:
Tabspace
uses memory to buffer several logical 128
byte
"sectors", both on read and writing.
An equate for MAXRAM sets
the maximum amount of memory available to Tabspace after CP/M and
Tabspace itself have nabbed their memory, and is initally set to
16 Kbytes.
(I reasoned that if you are going to run Kermit-80
version 4.08 or later you should have at least this amount of
free memory!) If you have more memory, you can adjust this to
some larger value, say 52 for a 62k system (ie 62K - 8k (CP/M) 2k (Tabspace) = 52k)
I used the Public Domain assembler LASM to assemble Tabspace; I
have no idea if any other assembles will work.
Anyway, LASM is
the ONLY assembler now used for Kermit-80 assembly.
Tabspace will expand tabs after a semicolon in a comment field,
but will not replace tabs for multiple spaces after a semicolon.
I ran into som real problems early on, and decided that spaces in
comment fields would be ok, so I left it in.
Any comments or contributions for Tabspace and/or
please send them to me (with tabs expanded!) as:
Kermit-80
OBSchou @ UK.AC.LOUGHBOROUGH.MULTICS
or
Kermit @ UK.AC.LOUGHBOROUGH.MULTICS
or
Bertil Schou,
The Computer Centre,
Loughborough Universirty of Technology,
Loughborough,
Leics. LE11 3TU
or
+ 509 -222313 (Direct Dial)
Many thanks for your co-operation,
Bertil Schou.