Xref: utzoo comp.os.os9:296 comp.sys.m6809:979
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!purdue!gatech!ncar!ames!pacbell!att!ihlpl!knudsen
From: knudsen@ihlpl.ATT.COM (Knudsen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os9,comp.sys.m6809
Subject: Re: BASIC09 quirk
Summary: Byte vs Integer
Keywords: byte
Message-ID: <8083@ihlpl.ATT.COM>
Date: 9 Dec 88 16:56:41 GMT
References: <497@pacsbb.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 30

Nah, no helpful comments, just more addition to the confusion.
My experience is that you can pass Bytes as parameters to
functions with no problems.  However, there is the quirk of
Motorola's (aka Rotorooter's) "big-endian" storage of multi-byte numbers
in memory.  Usually this just means that you have to have perfect
agreement between your calling and called procedures' declarations
(don't feed a Byte to a proc expecting Integer, and the reverse).
Otherwise values can get multiplied or divided by 256.

The pain is that if a function foo expects Byte, you can't call
it with a numeric constant, eg as RUN foo(43).
Because B09 takes 43 as an Integer constant, so foo() sees only
its high byte, which in this case is 0.

So to do the above you need:
	DIM beans:BYTE
	...
	beans = 43
	foo(beans)

which is a waste in an already too verbose language.

I'm interested that PACKed procedures worked better for you.
My experience is that PACKing ruins the system's ability to find
and link to the machine-code fcns like INKEY and SYSCALL,
so I never use PACK.
-- 
Mike Knudsen  Bell Labs(AT&T)   att!ihlpl!knudsen
"Lawyers are like nuclear bombs and PClones.  Nobody likes them,
but the other guy's got one, so I better get one too."