SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: Depends upon the environment. Under AmigaOS you have RawDoFmt(), which is part of Exec and available to Assembly language programmers (and it works similar to C's printf()). Under MS-DOS you have INT 21h, funtion 9, which prints a text string (ended by a `$'). But all you really need is a way to print out characters, leaving printing of numeric values as a programming exercise. In fact, writing a printf()-like routine (no formatting, just stuff like `%d' and `%s') is fairly simple (6809 code): ********************************************** * PRINTF - a printf()-esque routine. * Entry: X - ASCIIZ string * U - user data stack * Exit: X - end of string * U - adjusted as data is used * A - 0 *********************************************** PRFT50 LDA ,X+ ; get next character after % CMPA #'% ; %? BEQ PRTF20 ; if so, print it CMPA #'d ; print a decimal number? BNE PRTF51 PULU D ; get value BSR DECOUT ; print it BRA PRINTF ; continue PRTF51 CMPA #'x ; print hex number? BNE PRTF52 PULU D ; get value BSR HEXOUT ; print hex value BRA PRINTF PRTF52 CMPA #'s ; print string? BNE PRTF20 PSHS X ; save current string PULU X ; get new string BSR PRINTF ; print it (oooh! recursion!) PULS X ; get old string BRA PRINTF PRTF10 CMPA #'% ; print data? BEQ PRFT50 ; if so, handle PRTF20 JSR CHROUT ; print character PRINTF LDA ,X+ ; get next character BNE PRTF10 ; if not NUL, continue RTS Now all that's left is writing CHROUT (or assume the system has such a routine), DECOUT and HEXOUT (HEXOUT is trivial, DECOUT may make some work). It's all a part of learning. -spc (Who wishes that Assembly was tought as a first language ... )