Legacy QE 3.5d

[hutch--]

The current version of QE will not run on Win9x OS versions including ME so I just did a quick rebuild of QE 3.5, fixed a couple of bits in it and added the basic support DLLs that it will use if present. The later version is a better tool written in MASM that is smaller, has more adjustments and has multi-level undo and a far more powerful scripting engine but QE 3 to 3.5 was very reliable, slogged its guts out for years and rarely ever had any problems.

[simonst]

Dear Mr. Hutchesson,
is it possible to overwrite the contents of the str## or int##
variables (declared in a qsc scriptfile) within a plugin-dll??
For example:
I declare the integer variable "var3" in the scriptfile, let
run a (user-defined) dll within the scriptfile for performing some
operations that are not possible to implement in qsc directly, and
let the dll store a certain value (as an user-defined "result value")
in "var3" so that it can easily be analyzed by the further
qsc-instructions of the script. Perhaps the string- and integer
variables (str0 to str1023 and var0 to var1023, which are at one´s
disposal) have a fixed allocated storage area that could be addressed
whith assembly code in the dll??

Many thanks and kind regards
Stefan

[hutch--]

Stefan,

Sorry to be a bit slow coming back to you, I got a bit busy for a while. The old script engine in QE was never originally designed to do as much as it ended up doing and it became incredibly complex to modify it for ever decreasing improvements, basically its architecture was not very extendable. When I wrote QE4.0 I used a completely new script engine coded almost exclusively in assembler that was a better design to start with and far faster. I had originally designed it as a standalone app but decided to use it in a DLL for QE as all I had to do was add the editor specific commands.

It is no joy either to edit but it is a much better design from scratch. The old QSC engine has a few quirks but it does most things OK and I am very wary of trying to change it without making a mess of it as it is a nightmare internally.

[simonst]

Dear Mr. Hutchesson,
thank You for Your reply, I can understand, no problem. But I am
sorry, my English is not good, perhaps I had chosen the wrong words
for expressing my question, I never would have expected that You
would change internal things in the old scripting engine, I only
thought that the string and integer variables (that are at one´s
disposal there) would have a fixed memory area from where they could
be addressed by assembly code in an user-defined plugin-dll. Really, I
appreciate Your QEditor, especially Your version 3.5 with the
excellent feature of "User defined text selection" and the "Add In
Text menu" with its additional text processing capacities, the
interaction between the old qsc scripting engine and the plugin
interface have worked so good that it was not necessary for me to
upgrade to QE 4.0, although I believe You when You say that the new
scripting engine has a completely other architecture.
For the case that it would not be possible to overwrite the contents
of qsc-variables directly from a plugin-dll, maybe the intermediate step
of storing the results of a dll operation in a temporary file may be
useful? Because this can easily be loaded into a qsc variable and
be analyzed by the further qsc instructions.

Best regards,
Stefan