Atom Virtual Machine / News: Recent posts

Well, Atom has been dormant for a while as personal issues have intruded into my project time, but I am trying to get back into the swing of things.

Looking at the code, I decided that I needed to move away from Delphi and to an open development language, and have decided to use FreeBasic. FreeBasic is open source, cross-platform and just an excellent basic programming language all around. You can find FreeBasic right here on SourceForge and it is worth a look.... read more

Due to some personal issues, I will be going offline for a bit. I will continue working on Atom while I am offline, so the project isn't dead. I am still working on BAX, and I am also looking at a Windows version of Atom. Hopefully, when I get back online, I will have some new stuff to post.

Not much is happening with Atom at the moment while I work on a Basic/C to Atom Assembler translator, called BAX. So far I have the following code working:

'This is a test file for the bax translator'
'This comment
spans two lines'
dim %a = 4
dim %b = 5 dim %c = 10
dim %d, %e, %f, %g
dim %h, %i, %str = "This is a string"

'assignments'
%d = 52 %e = 24
'assigments with math'
%f = 12 + 34.5 * (6 / 4)
'assignments with math and vars'
%g = %d+%e*(5+%a)
%h = "This is a string value."
%i = %h
print ("a: "; %a, "b:"; %b, "c: "; %c, "d: "; %d, "e: "; %e,
"f: "; %f, "g: "; %g, "h: "; %h, "i: "; %i, "A string")
gosub label1
goto label2
print("You won't see this.")
:label2
print("This is the end.")
end... read more

Since Atom seems fairly stable at this point I have bumped it to version 1.0 and marked it as stable. There may be a bug or two lurking in there somewhere, but I haven't come across any lately.

This is the final console version and is feature-complete, except for bug fixes. 1.0 also includes a binder that you can use to compile the source into a standalone exe.

Things have been a little slow lately, but I plan on getting things back on track in January. The console version seems stable at the moment so I am going to upgrade it to Beta rather than Alpha.

The next step is to try and get some sort of windows version out. There are a few issues to be worked out on that. Right now I am using Delphi, but I may have to go to C. I am looking at PellesC as a possible target platform. It is free, and has a nice set of features. However, since I am not much of a C programmer, this will be a learning experience. I think I need to do it though. Moving to C will really open up the project and allow me to do things I couldn't do (very easily) otherwise.

I have converted Atom from BCX/LCC to Delphi, as well as adding in quite a few new opcodes. This will be the last release for a while as I plan the next step in the VM.

The conversion to FreePascal is proceeding, but slowly right now. I was able to scare up a paying job, so for right now, that takes precedence (I like to eat). I am still trying to maintain the schedule listed on the Tasks page, but no promises at this point.

The good folks as SourceForge were kind enough to approve my request for setting up Atom here. I am still trying to get things set up, so if something isn't working yet, please bear with me.