Improving PBASIC: Request for Comments

[Greg Ross]

Back at the end of last month, there was a Simplifying PBasic thread going in the General Forum. I mentioned I was going to enhance my BASIC Stamp Preprocessor to add a block IF capability (IF ... ELSEIF ... ELSE ... ENDIF).

Here is my proposed syntax:

'{$IF condition 1}
  statement block 1
'{$ELSEIF condition 2}
  statement block 2

...

'{$ELSE}
  statement block n
'{$ENDIF}

Which the preprocessor would translate to:

if (condition 1) then Label1
if (condition 2) then Label2
...

  statement block n
  goto EndIfLabel

Label1:
  statement block 1
  goto EndIfLabel

Label2:
  statement block 2
  goto EndIfLabel

...

EndIfLabel:

Where Label1, Label2, EndIfLabel are labels generated by the preprocessor.


My intention is to allow nested $IF ... $ENDIFs -- although I haven't worked out just how I'm going to implement that yet. I may end up disallowing nesting if implementation becomes too hairy -- or at least not supporting it in the initial implementation(s).

What do y'all think?

FYI: I chose the '{$directive parameter} format to match the '{$Stamp } directive format since I needed to parse it anyway to get the list project files.