Imbastardizer  Imbastardizer

Description

Imbastardizer is a source preprocessor, especially suited for old or limited dialects of BASIC.

It's written in Vim Script, and can be executed on Vim or Neovim.

• Homepage.
• Repository.

Features

Planned for version 1.0.0:

• Splitted lines.
• Labels instead of line numbers.
• Shell-style line comments.
• #define, #ifdef, #ifndef directives.
• #vim directive to execute any Vim command in the source.

The previous version 0.4.2 had many more features and a different approach.

Status

At the time of writing (2021-04) Imbastardizer is being rewritten to prepare version 1.0.0.

Installation and usage

To install Imbastardizer, copy "imbastardizer.vim" to the "~/.vim" directory. Then the program can be executed with Vim's runtime command.

Example of a "Makefile" rule that preprocess a BASIC source file with Imbastardizer:

src/%.bas: target/%.bas
	@vim -e -R \
		-c "runtime imbastardizer.vim" \
		-c "saveas! $@|q!" $<

History

Imbastardizer started in 2016-12, as an improved replacement for previous tools developed by the author for one specific dialect of BASIC:

• BBim for Beta BASIC (ZX Spectrum)
• MBim for MasterBASIC (SAM Coupé)
• SBim for S*BASIC (Sinclair QL or SMSQ/E)
• Vimclair BASIC for Sinclair BASIC (ZX Spectrum)

The goal of Imbastardizer was to replace them all and select the target with a directive. Anyway, the initial targets were new: GW-BASIC and MSX-BASIC.

The supported features were the following:

• C-style block and line comments.
• Shell-style line comments.
• Splitted lines.
• Labels instead of line numbers.
• #vim directive to execute any Vim command in the source.
• #include, #define, #ifdef, #ifndef and others.
• Long variable names using the #vim directive to make the substitutions.
• Control structures (can be nested):
  • DO ... LOOP
  • DO ... LOOP UNTIL
  • DO ... LOOP WHILE
  • DO UNTIL... LOOP
  • DO UNTIL ... LOOP UNTIL
  • DO UNTIL ... LOOP WHILE
  • DO WHILE ... LOOP
  • DO WHILE ... LOOP UNTIL
  • DO WHILE ... LOOP WHILE
  • EXIT DO
  • EXIT FOR
  • IF ... THEN ... ENDIF
  • IF ... THEN ... ELSE ... ENDIF
  • IF ... THEN ... ELSE IF ... ELSE ... ENDIF (with any number of ELSE IF)
• Procedures (without parameters): DEF PROC, END PROC, EXIT PROC, CALL.
• Procedures with parameters can be simulated ad hoc with the #vim directive.
• The CALL command can be changed with #procedureCall, e.g.: #procedureCall proc or even make it empty: #procedureCall.

In 2016-12..2017-07 Imbastardizer was heavily tested during the development of the CE4 project in GW-BASIC for the PC-BASIC emulator.

Then the CE4 project changed its target platform and the development of Imbastardizer stagned. Besides, although it worked great, extending some features, especially the control structures and the pseudo-procedures, to support more target dialects of BASIC seemed too complex for the small benefit.

In 2021-04 the need for a generic but simpler source preprocessor arised during the development of the CE4 project in NextBASIC, and rewritting Imbastardizer with a new approach seemed the best option.

In order to resume the development of Imbastardizer, its Git repository was converted to Fossil, but keeping GitHub as a mirror. The latest version was tagged as v0.4.2.