Unfinished Bitness

In this post I expand on the Action! record data type.  A record is a combination of multiple data types.  It is declared as a TYPE, then a variable of that type is initialized just like it would be with other types such as BYTE, CARD, and INT.  Why would you need this?  To group common elements together such as a date, or an address.

Declaring a record type takes the following syntax (type definition followed by variable declaration):

TYPE type_name=[ variable_type variable_name ... ]
type_name variable_name

Example:

TYPE date=[CARD year BYTE month, day]
date birthday

Once declared each element of the variable can be accessed through the main variable name:

birthday.year
birthday.month
birthday.day

Complete Source

In this example I will group a CARD and two BYTEs in a record to form a date. It’s short and well commented so I won’t break it down:

MODULE

; Declare custom date type
; Consists of a CARD and two BYTEs
TYPE tDate=[CARD cYear  
            BYTE bMonth,bDay]


; Main Routine
PROC Main()
; Declare a record from defined date type
tDate rDate

; Setup screen
Poke(82,0)
Put($7D)
PutE()
PrintE("-[Record]-------------------------------")

; Get year, store in record
Print("Date: Year?")
rDate.cYear=InputC()

; Get month, store in record
Print("      Month?")
rDate.bMonth=InputB()

; Date day, store in record
Print("      Day?")
rDate.bDay=InputB()
                 
PutE()
                 
; Print date from record reformatted
PrintF("Date: %U.%B.%B%E%E",
       rDate.cYear,
       rDate.bMonth,
       rDate.bDay)

; Print each component of record
PrintE("Record:")
PrintF("  rDate.cYear=%U%E",rDate.cYear)
PrintF("  rDate.bMonth=%B%E",rDate.bMonth)
PrintF("  rDate.bDay=%B%E",rDate.bDay)
 
RETURN

Results