Introduction

Hunter’s built-in text editor provides practical text handling facilities.

It may be used for the creation and alteration of standard ASCII text files for reports, correspondence, etc. This feature is invaluable for text entry ‘on the move’ in trains, planes or any other form of transport. Text may then be easily printed out on return to the office.

Husky Basic files, which are encoded to save memory and execution time, may also be edited directly. These files are recognised by their use of the .HBA suffix. It is important, therefore, to maintain the .HBA suffix convention when attempting to edit Basic programs.

Note

Encoded source files for other interpreted programs e.g. MBASIC cannot be edited with this editor.

Automatic Cont Edit

On entry to the Editor from either Basic or Demos, the HUNTER is forced into Cont mode. This applies even if the Editor has been initiated but the HUNTER is still converting a Basic tokenised program into its text equivalent and the normal Editor screen is not yet displayed.

If the HUNTER is now powered down, either by manually pressing the power key or by auto-timeout due to lack of keyboard operation, then on power up the HUNTER re-enters the Editor and continues operation from where it ceased at power down. This applies in all cases e.g. midway through a search, writing to a file or exiting to Basic and recreating a Basic tokenised file from its text equivalent. This feature ensures that all data entered into the Hunter whilst in the Editor is always accessible to the user. On exit from the Editor, either by ‘Exit’ or ‘Save’, the HUNTER is forced out of Cont mode automatically. Thus, if the HUNTER is powered down, then it will power up normally.

Editor program size check

When the Editor is initiated, an automatic check on the file size is carried out. Since the Editor uses only the TPA for its work space, if a text file greater in length than the TPA is attempted to be edited, a warning message will be displayed and the operation will be aborted.

Note

The file will not have been changed in any way and the Hunter will not be in auto Cont mode.

In the case of editing a Basic tokenised program, a check is carried out on the size of the tokenised program so that its text equivalent form would not be greater in length than the size of the TPA.

Basic programs are tokenised so as to reduce the amount of memory required to store the program and increase the speed of operation of the Basic program. On converting a Basic tokenised program into its text equivalent, the size of the program increases by approximately 1/3. Hence, although the size of the Basic tokenised program (obtained by using the STAT command in DEMOS) indicates that it would fit into the TPA, this, of course, does not imply that its text equivalent would fit into the TPA and, therefore, it cannot be assumed the Basic tokenised program can be edited.

The maximum size of a Basic tokenised program which can be edited is approximately 36K bytes. Hence, for normal applications this size check does not impose limitations upon the HUNTER.