Xref: utzoo misc.misc:4321 comp.sys.hp:1395 comp.sys.misc:1995
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-sdd!holt
From: holt@hp-sdd.HP.COM (Holt Mebane)
Newsgroups: misc.misc,comp.sys.hp,comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: HP9836 BASIC -- HELP !!
Message-ID: <1809@hp-sdd.HP.COM>
Date: 3 Jan 89 21:05:19 GMT
References: <281@vmsa.technion.ac.il>
Reply-To: holt@hp-sdd.UUCP (Holt Mebane)
Organization: Hewlett Packard, San Diego
Lines: 44

*** SORRY TO POST, BUT COULD NOT SEND DIRECTLY ***

In article <281@vmsa.technion.ac.il> ners001@vmsa.technion.ac.il writes:
>*******
>
>Does anybody out there know what the following lines of BASIC mean?
> (this is supposedly written for an HP 9836)
>
>SUB Out_word(@GPIB,INTEGER Xbuf(*),N)
>     INTEGER Odata
>     FOR I=1 TO N
>       Odata=ROTATE(Xbuf(I),8)
>       OUTPUT @GPIB USING "#,W";Odata
>     NEXT I
>     SUBEND
>
>This obviously is sending data to a GPIB device, but what would be the
>equivalent in C?  What does the ROTATE function do?   What does the
>output look like (binary word transfer or formatted ASCII)?
>
>Thanks for all your help,
>
>Benjamin Cohen
>NERS001@VMSA.TECHNION.AC.IL     (bitnet)

The ROTATE function does a logical rotate on a 16 bit operand. If the
bit position displacement argument (in this case 8) is positive, it does
a rotate right; negative, left. The output specifier ("#,W") specifies
that the output is word-wide, binary, no carriage-return or linefeed.

So, what this program is doing is swapping bytes in a word and outputting
them to GPIB. Now if GPIB is set up to be the HPIB interface, a logical
question is "What is word-wide since the GPIB is inherently 8 bits wide?"
Well, it will output the data in 2 bytes, MSB first. 
Hope this helps.

                                Holt Mebane
_________________________________________________________________________
UUCP  : {hplabs|hp-pcd|hpfcla|hpda|noscvax|gould|ucsd}!hp-sdd!holt
UUCP  : {cbosgd|allegra|decvax|gatech|sun|tektronix}!hplabs!hp-sdd!holt
ARPA  : hp-sdd!holt@nosc.arpa
CSNET : hp-sdd!holt@hplabs.csnet
USmail: 16399 W. Bernardo Drive, San Diego CA 92127-1899 USA
Phone : (619) 592-4882