VFP and PI in ABC 5.00

“I wanna have a good time” so “I’m floatin’ around in ABC”, as newly released in DDE31.

The Mandelbrot example is impressive, but moving on to Going round in circles, quickly :-

ABC will also make use of the supporting trig and logarithm functions when required

Using the example given :-

start%=TIME
FOR rad = 0 TO 2*PI STEP 0.000001
  x = COS(rad) : y = SIN(rad)
NEXT
PRINT TIME-start%;" centiseconds"

This fails to compile with VFP with ABC 5.00 with this splendid gibberish.

Errors in : ADFS::Titan4.$.Work.BASICWork.ABC.circles.pi
     2 E Code generator error:EFP immediate attempted

It is the constant PI the compiler dislikes. Returning to the second form at school and using the approximation of 22/7 resulted in success and the speed increase of the compiled object could be seen.

This compiles with VFP :-

_pi = 3.14159265
start%=TIME
FOR rad = 0 TO 2*_pi STEP 0.000001
x = COS(rad) : y = SIN(rad)
NEXT
PRINT TIME-start%;" centiseconds"

but this does not :-

DEF _pi = 3.14159265
REM {NOCOMPILE}
_pi = 3.14159265
REM {COMPILE}
start%=TIME
FOR rad = 0 TO 2*_pi STEP 0.000001
x = COS(rad) : y = SIN(rad)
NEXT
PRINT TIME-start%;" centiseconds"

The error is :-

Line 6 E Code generator error:EFP immediate attempted

An FPA compile is fine.

Bug? Foible? User incompetence?

(StrongED needs a tweak to not indent on the DEF manifest constant declaration.)