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                                                      Bots / The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 5






                    112     The Ultimate Palm Robot




                                 The Robot Geek Says


                                 Fun Facts to Know and Tell About Programming
                                         For the most part, we assume that if you want to program the robot,
                                      you already know how to write software—at least a little. If you are not
                                      a programmer, here are some fun facts to know about software
                                      programming:
                                   ✖  You usually write a program using human-readable words. The code you
                                      write is known as source code. Many different languages for writing code
                                      are available, including C, C++, BASIC, and Java.
                                   ✖  The computer doesn’t understand human-readable words—at least not
                                      yet—so the program is converted into a machine-readable form, also
                                      known as binary code or executable code.
                                   ✖  The process of converting the source code to binary code is generally
                                      known as compiling.

                               Load TEA Files to the PDA  If you are running the Console program on
                               your PC, skip ahead to the “Compile a TEA File” section. Before you can
                               compile any programs on your PDA, you need to load them to the PDA. TEA
                               files are stored as memos on your PDA. The first line of the memo must
                               contain only the name of the program. The easiest way to do this is to create
                               the memo on your Palm Desktop (or in Outlook, if that’s the program you use
                               to synchronize with your PDA) and then perform a hot sync operation to load
                               it to the PDA.

                                  Find the simple.tea program in the \brainstem or \aSystem directory and
                               copy it into a memo or an Outlook note. Add the line simple.tea as the first line
                               of the memo:

                               simple.tea
                               /* simple.tea                                      */
                               /* BrainStem PPRK program                          */
                               /* Wait till back sensor is approached, then do a  */
                               /* little jig.                                     */

                               Note that even though the original first line (the second line in this listing) did
                               contain the name, it was part of a comment (everything between /* and */ is
                               a comment) and so would not be recognized as the program name.

                                 If you look at the next few lines of the memo, you’ll see some statements
                               that look like this:






           P:\010Comp\Bots\880-6\ch05.vp
           Monday, May 12, 2003 4:06:13 PM
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