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Libraries
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1993-10-18
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A quick guide to the supplied libraries
---------------------------------------
Although each library contains help text for each procedure/function (and the
library as a whole), here is an outline of the available libraries supplied
with BlibII :
The Memory Library
------------------
The memory library provides a convenient and fast memory allocation for Basic
programs. It also has full deallocation (something missing from Basic) and
can even control the size of your wimpslot (raining AND lowering).
It provides the usual functions and procedures (malloc, free, realloc, etc.)
as well as a general purpose memory copy routine.
The Wimp Library
----------------
This library contains routines for initialising your program with the wimp
(including placing the sprite on the iconbar), quitting your application
cleanly, producing errors and messages, and performing a wimp poll.
The wimp poll procedure is made using a unique feature of the BlibII linker,
the 'update block'. This means that each time you pass your program through
the linker, this procedure is updated (ripped out and replaced).
This is done because the procedure uses another feature of the linker,
conditional linking. This means that exactly what is linked into your
program depends upon what your program requires. Thus the call to a, say,
key press handling procedure is only linked in if your program needs it.
You indicate which events you can handle, by providing event handlers for
that event (see the Event library, below).
The Event Library
-----------------
This library contains a few default event handlers (eg. for handling
window open events). You can, however, write you own replacement version
of these routines if they don't do what you require.
The main purpose of the Event library, however, is in it's main description
which lists all the procedure names for event handlers which you can write
into your program, and which will get called automatically by the wimp poll
procedure from the Wimp library.
The Data Transfer Library (Transfer)
-------------------------
This library provides a number of routines to help handle saving and loading
of data to/from applications.
The main part of this library is an 'update block', so the more functionality
your program requires from this library, the more functionality you get.
(See the main description in this library for details).
The Template Library
--------------------
This library contains the necessary routines to load a templates file into
memory (or multiple files), locate templates from loaded files, and also
make (and destroy) copies of templates.
The Window Library
------------------
This library supplies routines for create, open, close, resize, move, delete
and redraw windows. Also set the title, get the position, set/get the extent,
set/get it's type (see below) and centre the window on the screen.
This library uses a special structure to hold windows which allows windows
to be given a type (and also local data). Thus then a procedure states
that it requires a 'window' as a parameter, this means this special data
structure, not the window's handle.
At present there are two supplied window types, the simple text window (which
allows text to be displayed in a window (using any of the wimp colours), and
a draw window (allowing a drawfile to be displayed in a window).
The Menu Library
----------------
This library contains routines allowing the creation of menus. It supplies
two methods of creating a menu (array based or building items one at a time).
The Draw and Sprite Libraries
-----------------------------
These two libraries contain routines for creating drawfiles and sprites, and
handling them, etc.
The Icon Library
----------------
This library contains a few useful routines relating to icons.
The Font Library
----------------
This library contains routines that allow the handling of fonts.
The Message Library
-------------------
Contains routines for handling messages files which allow software to be
written in a language independent way. It also provides a way of creating
menus from a message file.
The OS Library
--------------
This library contains a few general routines for handling :
- Program arguments
- Finding the screen size and number of colours
- Writing and reading zero terminated strings
- Reading system variables
- Calling OS_GSTrans
The Calendar Library
--------------------
This library contains various routines related to the calendar, including :
- Finding the day of the week for a given date
- Finding todays date from TIME$
- Finding the number of days in a given year
- Finding if a given year is a leap year or not
- Finding the number of days between any two dates
- Finding out if a given date is valid
- Finding out what day of the year a given date is
The take account of the calendar switch in 1752, but leap years are assumed
to follow the current method of calculation.
The Slider (Sub) Library
------------------------
The Slider Library (which is located within the Icon library, allows simple
and convenient handling of sliders. The routines allow for the Risc OS 3
style of slider icons (as defined in the Risc OS 3 Style Guide) which
comprise of three icons, a well, a base and the slider icon.