My life coding started like many my age and older, with a 8bit C64 and playing with BASIC. I later moved onto my precious (A500 with 512kb expansion and extra floppy drive), but sadly struggled to get going with coding. So i gave up for a while before getting a PC and learning some Pascal at college.
But I never gave up wanting to learn, ive played with some BASIC dialects and C++ on my A500 and A1200s, but i found a book the E language and started playing. I found it hard to find easy to access docs, so once i started needing to use Modules, i struggled. Aminet has a huge E section, but i found many of the resources hard to access on a PC, so i hit a brick wall and the idea went back on the back burner
When Annthropic dropped the open access to fable i had an idea. How easily could i get Fable to parse all of the docs, examples and archives on Aminet and create me a nice, easy to access set of docs, that lists all of the modules and libraries. This was pretty good, i soon has a full local site full of docs and even some inferred from repeated patterns in examples.
Now i had a large collection of docs and access to an agent that chews up big tasks…..that got ideas turning in my head and i decided to start a matching IDE using both codemirror and the SAE JS Based Amiga emulator (i love this project!).This was fine and i was able to use VAMOS and the original E compiler to compile the E code on the host and serve it back to the client and mount in the amiga emulator but this was slow and clunky.
Surely if….. i mean……everything can run in JS if youre stupid enough..sooooo
/goal I would like you to create a byte for byte copy of the EC compiiler but in javascript so we can run it in either node of http. Surely it will work, all we need to do is compile the code in both EC and our compiler and eventually we will run enough compilations itll work it out. I also wasnt away that Wouter van Oortmerssen has opensourced the libs until half way through. I left it running over night, but come the morning i had a compiler that can could handle a small collection of apps, but soon hit a few issues. But enough to consider reaching out to Wouter to ask for permission to publish this. After getting permission, i uploaded the first version of the Web Based IDE and Docs site.
In a range of themes too
I then set about improving how it works and offering full support with all the modules and libs, this pointed out i was missing a linker and so i was ready to give Fable a similar command, but the night before, the US gov banned the model and i was back with Opus. So with well defined prompt and a collection of tools and a consistent reminder of how loops are supposed to work, we set about adding the linker and trying to get all examples we had working. In the end, i think close to 900k lines of E code was used to create the linker. This now allows the use of .m module in your project.
So while continuing testing and adding examples to the IDE, we ticked off other little bugs and even managed to add a run time patch for a floating point bug we found in the 40.068 rom, just enable in the emulator if you get exceptions using FP maths on the 068 version of WB3.1
I added a fair few examples on the iDE, feel free to try them out
