Want to test DLL for Xbasic?

[EJR]

Attached is a tiny DLL with an Xbasic script to test.

If you are not an experienced Xbasic programmer, don't bother. If you want to see Xbasic from the inside out, you might have fun. This gives you an idea of how fast/slow various Xbasic commands are.

There are some test functions that indicate the time overhead in calling a DLL function. And there are two useful functions:

- StrLen as N() is a clone of len(); due to DLL overhead, it doesn't get faster except for longer strings (> 2,000 bytes?). Outside of A5, it can count 4 billion characters per second.

- RepChar as C(AsciiVal as N, Count as N) is MUCH FASTER than replicate(), but can only replicate a single character. Due to limitations of A5's design, the replicated string is limited to 1023 bytes (although it will actually replicate as many as 1 million internally - you can time it to get an idea).

If you are so inclined, please test this and give me feedback. If there is some function you would like me to create, please let me know.

To install, copy ExternDLL.dll to the directory where your version of AlphaFive is installed. Copy the .TXT file to a new Xbasic script, and you should be good to go.

It should work with all versions of A5, and should work in any Windows OS and any 32-bit CPU. Builds prior to 4050 will not work properly with the StrLen() command on strings 1k or greater in length. And A5 current limits the length of a string passed from a DLL to Xbasic to a maximum of 1023 characters.

Thanks,

Eric

[Stan Mathews]

Re: Want to test DLL for Xbasic?

Eric,

I wonder if your efforts would yield better results if you tried to develop functions that "compacted" several existing functions that are commonly used together.

I don't claim to know what all of those might be but I get a lot of data that I must "normalize" due to the haphazard efforts of those generating the info.

For instance padded character digit fields sometimes need to be adjusted to the same length.

somefieldvalue = "0012347   " 'several trailing spaces

? padl(alltrim(str(val(somefieldvalue))),8,"0")
= "00012347"

Takes four functions to do it this way.

[EJR]

Re: Want to test DLL for Xbasic?

Stan,

That's EXACTLY the type of input I was hoping for, and you hit the nail on the head. Your example breaks down to the following:

a = val(somefieldvalue)
b = str(a)
c = alltrim(b)
d = padl(c,8,"0)

There are six parameters pushed (4 strings, which are the slowest to pass); four functions called; and four values returned (3 strings, which are the slowest to pass). This could conceivably be replaced by something like:

a = PadTrimStrVal(somefieldvalue,8,"0")

That's three parameters pushed (2 strings) and one string returned. It might be interesting to see the speed difference.

Eric

[CALocklin]

Re: Want to test DLL for Xbasic?

NEVER MIND.

file.machines_get("S") does the job.

?file.machines_get()
= \\AIMS_DataCom\
\\AIMS_DataCom3\

Original question:

How about a command that would list all available drives including UNC names?

Alpha can list mapped drives with file.drives_get() but that doesn't show UNC drives and I'd like to create a truly inclusive "aims_get_path()" function that allows (among many other things) the user to select a UNC path as well as a mapped path. Unfortunately, I haven't found any way to get a list of the UNC drives through A5 other than manually finding them with ui_browse_for_folder().