Possible to detect if program is run in editor?

[zooperdan]

Hi

I wonder if there is any way to detect if the program is running in the editor or started from WB or CLI?

Cheers.

[Thomas Richter]

Huh? What do you mean "running in the editor"? What is "the editor", and how can an editor run a program?

AmigaOs "only" has two execution environments, the shell and the workbench.

[aros-sg]

Guess: This is Blitz Basic Forum, so he means running/starting it from/in Blitz Basic editor, similiar to how you can run/start Amiga Basic programs from the editor or Pascal programs from Hispeed Pascal editor.

[zooperdan]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Huh? What do you mean "running in the editor"? What is "the editor", and how can an editor run a program?

AmigaOs "only" has two execution environments, the shell and the workbench.

Well, by editor I of course mean the Blitz Basic editor. The one you do the coding in and then compile and run.

I want to be able to detect in code whether the program was run from the editor or if it's a compiled program started from either WB or CLI. This way I can i.e show some debug info, allow certain keypresses/cheats etc. while developing.

The ideal would be a preprocessor directive which only includes and executes a code segment if it's compiled/ran from within the Blitz Basic editor. When you compile those segments are not included in the build. This is a common feature of most development environments.

Example

#IF EDITOR
; some code which is only compiled and executed while in the editor
#ENDIF

[Daedalus]

Blitz and its variants allow you to compile code directly from the IDE into RAM and run it there with various debugging and monitoring options. There's no executable file involved in this process, and effectively it's running "from the editor" instead of from Workbench or the shell. This is typically done to test a program during development, with compiling to an executable file done later once it's nearly ready.

To answer the OP, yes there is. It's a function called FromBlitz and will return true if run from the Blitz IDE and false otherwise. It's not a core Blitz function however, it's in the RIMiscLib command library. This is included with most distributions of Blitz however, so chances are you already have it installed. If Blitz doesn't recognise the keyword FromBlitz, have a look at updating the installation to a more complete version.

Edit: I can't think of any way to do automatic conditional compiling based on whether it has been run from the editor or not. You could manually control it using a constant:

#debug = True

CNIF #debug
  NPrint "This is a debug build"
CEND

and then change the #debug to False when you build your final executable. AmiBlitz 3 has a compile-time constant #__debug (two underscores), which tells you if the debugger is running, though you can still run the code from the editor with the debugger turned off, in which case the compiler will also skip your debug code. That constant isn't available in Blitz 2 however...

[zooperdan]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Blitz and its variants allow you to compile code directly from the IDE into RAM and run it there with various debugging and monitoring options. There's no executable file involved in this process, and effectively it's running "from the editor" instead of from Workbench or the shell. This is typically done to test a program during development, with compiling to an executable file done later once it's nearly ready.

To answer the OP, yes there is. It's a function called FromBlitz and will return true if run from the Blitz IDE and false otherwise. It's not a core Blitz function however, it's in the RIMiscLib command library. This is included with most distributions of Blitz however, so chances are you already have it installed. If Blitz doesn't recognise the keyword FromBlitz, have a look at updating the installation to a more complete version.

Perfect. Thank you! I used to do a lot of programming in Blitz Basic but that's 3 decades ago. It feels like I have to learn it all over again.

[zooperdan]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Edit: I can't think of any way to do automatic conditional compiling based on whether it has been run from the editor or not. You could manually control it using a constant:

#debug = True

CNIF #debug
  NPrint "This is a debug build"
CEND

and then change the #debug to False when you build your final executable. AmiBlitz 3 has a compile-time constant #__debug (two underscores), which tells you if the debugger is running, though you can still run the code from the editor with the debugger turned off, in which case the compiler will also skip your debug code. That constant isn't available in Blitz 2 however...

Thanks again. Yeah that CNIF/CEND is something I can work with.

[Daedalus]

Cool, that's the method I use and it works well for me. Enjoy