old math app still works :-)

An idle webcrawl through 4corn to drobe to the old hensa-micro archive led me to

mathsv10/arc

It does algebra, geometry, and low-level calculus.

It’s been many years since I took any math classes but I can’t help but keep an eye out for such things. ;-)

This is in BASIC, which is why it still works… I have a question though:

How do I make it be run by BASICVFP so it’ll use the FP hardware? !run is just “run <obey$dir>.!runimage”

To specify VFP BASIC, try…

*BASICVFP -chain <Obey$Dir>.!RunImage

Note - normally you'd use *BASIC64 and let it pick the best one (VFP or FPA) depending upon the available hardware. https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/*BASICVFP

Excellent! Thank you.
And since this is a full-screen BASIC program, nothing’s going to sneak in and muck with <Obey$Dir> while it’s running, right? I know enough RISC OS that that’s making me nervous. ;-)

Once it is running, the information about where to load the file from is not needed any more, so it doesn’t matter if the value of Obey$Dir changes.

Ahh but the app itself does file I/O to <Obey$Dir> ! Hence my concern.

the app itself does file I/O to <Obey$Dir>

Which is where the author really ought to have done a Set MathAppDir <Obey$Dir> and then used the MathAppDir in the application code.

Easily fixed as you’ll appreciate, Set line before the RunImage line in the !Run file and one Obey$Dir replacement in the BASIC file. Simples :)

Many times it doesn’t actually matter, but it’s a good habit that prevents nasty surprises.