Turnbull China Bikeride/Turnbull China Bikeride - Disc 1.iso/ARGONET/PD/MATHS/RLAB/RLAB125.ZIP/!RLaB/help_ai/ACORN

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 3KB | 69 lines

ACORN:
    This is RLaB for RISC OS, 1.123, RISC OS version 1.0.
    As far as I know, it runs up for the title of 'Fattest RISC OS program'
    since it is > 1.4M in size. No, won't run on a 2Mb machine :-).

    If you have reached this far, and you are reading this as displayed
    by RLaB, it means that you should have no problems starting !RLaB and
    typing
    >help ACORN

    But maybe you are reading this through an editor of its own;
    either way here is useful info regarding the RISC OS RLaB port.

    To start RLaB, you can either double click on its icon or on an 'R'
    file (&121). If cliking an 'R' file, RLaB will quit after running the
    specified file. It can be forced to go interactive adding a '-' at the
    end of the command line in the !Boot file. See help\RLAB for more details
    or uncomment the last !Boot line (commenting out the 6th)

    RLaB might refuse to start if too large a wimpslot ( > of the required
    wimpslot size, specified in !Run) is allocated to 'next task' by the task
    manager. Try reducing the 'next' wimpslot in task manager down to, say,
    640K.

    I've tried to part as little as possible from RLaB's original
    distribution. The main RISC OS differences are related to some RISC OS
    improvements and some UNIX features not working.

    RISC OS improvements:
    - file type (&121):
      RLaB has an filetype of its own ,officially allocated
      This means that it checks, whenever a load/require/rfile request is
      made, the type is checked versus the type specified in the !Run file:
      Set RLaB$FILETYPE    RLaB
      You can change it if you wish so. Default is text, so if you remove
      it from the !run file, RLaB will load text (&FFF) files only.
      I don't see much of a use now, it dates back to when RLaB didn't
      have an official filetype of its own.

    - throwback:
      it is enabled with the -t switch from command line.
      It requires to have the DEutils and Frontend modules as supplied
      with Acorn's C Compilers. They are not available for me to
      distribute (yes, I have asked). A 'SWI not known' message will appear
      if you enable throwback without the modules being present.

    - draw files creation as graphic output.
      a specific plplot driver has been added to enable draw file creation
      Note that the background colour (it's a rectangle object) can be
      modified by the user through the _plscolbg function (see plplot 'R' file
      line 271 for an example, and to set your own default). This creates a
      draw file on disk.

    - you might have noticed that an iconbar is missing, and there is no way
      to drag a 'R' file to the RLaB window to load it. Erm, a RLaB front end
      is in the pipeline (Well, I am an awful RISC OS programmer) but I
      still have not decided how to implement it. The only sure thing is that
      I will use the task window message passing protocol. It might be a C
      program, but I'm also considering seriuosly TCL/W now that it has
      been ported by C.T.Stretch ([e-mail])

    RISC OS deficiencies:
    - I think most, if not all, UNIX specific commands relying on piping ('|')
      and unix specific utils (e.g. lpr) will not work.
      However, to workaround this if you wish, take a look at the original
      gnuplot 'R' file and see how I worked it around to create a RISC OS
      version