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Posting this in the hope that it might help some people grok what they are actually doing: When I first discovered what Yoric and syg were doing, the first thi
by dblohm7 9y ago
Posting this in the hope that it might help some people grok what they are actually doing:
When I first discovered what Yoric and syg were doing, the first thing that I thought of was old-school Visual Basic. IIRC when you saved your source code from the VB IDE, the saved file was not text: it was a binary AST.
When you reopened the file in the VB6 IDE, the code was restored to text exactly the way that you had originally written it.
- Yoric 9y agoInteresting. Do you know of any technical documentation on the topic?
- meredydd 9y agoThe parent might have been thinking of QuickBasic, which saved programs as byte-code, along with formatting information to turn it back into text: http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/Tokenized_Code http://www.qb64.net/wiki/index.php/Tokenized_Code VB6 projects were actually a textual format - even the widget layout: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa241723(v=vs.60).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa241723(v=vs.60).a... As someone who runs a WYSIWYG app builder startup (https://anvil.works https://anvil.works), I can attest that this is a Really Good Idea for debugging your IDE.
- iainmerrick 9y agoBBC Basic did this too -- keywords were stored as single bytes (using the 128-255 values unused by ASCII). Apart from that the program code wasn't compiled, it just was interpreted directly. Very smart design when everything had to fit in 32KB of RAM.