Compiling a HBasic program

When you start the HBasic interpreter to execute a HBasic source program or the compiler to create an executable binary both functions need the HBasic parser to check the syntax of the source code. The parser has to do three different things when beeing started. Since the infomation about the structure of the source code is already needed for further parser actions there are two parsing phases in HBasic. The first one will only gather information about the source code and the second one generates the code for the interpreter or compiler. You can find some more information about the compilation in the following documents.

Parser steps in HBasic

The best documentation for the steps the parser executes is always the program itself. This document should give some hints that may help to understand the parser. The main parsing function is start_compiler in the source_file parse0.cpp. The following table shows some steps that will be executed by the parser.
 
 
Step Description Used with
Prepare output file Open and prepare the compiler output hbasic.s C
Preparse source files Find declarations and structures. Search for "Sub", "Event", "Inherits" ... I+C
Create package list Write description for list of packages used with the project. I+C
Assign Events Assign Labels for Functions that may be executed when an event will be raised C
Main compile Compile all modules and create runtime code I+C
Assign breakpoints Create special break-code at breakpoint addresses I
Assign Events Assign destination address for functions that may be executed when an event will be raised. I
Create global initcode Create code that will be started first after starting program execution. I+C
Start program Start interpreter or assemble, link and start compiler code. I+C

Documenting structures created by the parser

Code of the interpreter

The interpreter code is separated into bytecode that will be executed at runtime and additional data that describes some information the interpreter needs at runtime. The most important part of this additional information is a description of the GUI structure the user has created in the GUI-designer. The interpreter will try to execute the bytecode which is constructed out of code-tags which describe the interpreter code that should be executed. The code tags are numbers starting with 0. A list of the known code-tags can be found in the file defines.h (Names starting with CODE_*). These code tags use additional information which will be placed behing the code tag in the runtime code. There may be for example a code to open dialog that has been set up in the GUI editor with some additional information about which dialog should be opened.

CODE_OPEN_DIA  <form description>

You can find a description of the code-tags that will be used with HBasic and some examples what code the parser creates for some common source code statements in "List of interpreter code tags".
 
 

Runtime variables for the interpreter

Code of the compiler

If you want to create an executable program with the compiler the HBasic program will execute the following steps: The code for the compiler will be generated with the same parser as the code for the interpreter. This is useful because the compiler executes similar code and uses similar runtime-structures as the interpreter. The main difference is that the compiler executes pure machine language to access variables or call library functions where the interpreter reads a code tag and then calls the depending runtime functions to access variables or library functions of the interpreter. Another difference is that the code for the interpreter uses absolute jump addresses when setting up loops or subroutine calls whereas the compiler uses symbolic labels and jumps to symbolic labels which will be linked to the runtime addresses or code offsets by the linker program.

The parser code (see Parsing steps in HBasic ) uses a global variable to check if if should create code for the compiler or interpreter. In the C-source code there are two macros (CODE_FOR_COMPILER and CODE_FOR_INTERPRETER) that return a value of TRUE if code for the compiler or code for the interpreter should be created.

Directory for the compiler

The compiler creates all files in the directory /usr/local/hbasic/compiler. The assembler source will be called hbasic.s. The executable program can be found in hbasic.exe. Copy this program to another place or computer if you want to use it as a standalone program. Remember to copy the packages in the directory /usr/local/hbasic/packages too if your program needs them.

Compiler library and runtime memory structure

open: parsing steps in HBasic
Documenting structures created by the parser
runtime variables for interpreter
xx Compiler library and runtime memory structure
xx list of interpreter code tags