The Preferences Dialog

The Preferences dialog (see Figure 26) has two parts corresponding to the two tabs labeled "Font" or "Punctuation usage".


Figure 26. The preferences dialog "Font" pane.

The "Font" tabbed pane is for changing the font, font size, font style, and syntax highlighting of the contents of assembly language text windows and for changing the font, font size, and font style for displaying the data in the tables of RAM and Register windows. These changes are saved between sessions.


Figure 27. The preferences dialog Punctuation usage pane.

The "Punctuation usage" tabbed pane (see Figure 27) is for specifying the uses of some of the assembly syntax punctuation characters. To change the use of a character, choose a new item from the popup menu in the right column next to the character. These changes are saved with the current machine.

You can change the character indicating the start of a comment, the character indicating the end of a label, and the first character in a pseudoinstruction. The default characters are semicolon (;), colon (:), and period (.), respectively. There must be exactly one character used for each of these three roles, and those three characters must be distinct from each other.

You can also indicate whether a punctuation character should be considered a token all by itself or whether it should be part of a symbol, which means it is joined with surrounding characters when forming a token. For example, if the character '!' is used as part of a symbol (as indicated in Figure 27), then the string "ab!4" will be parsed as one token. However, if '!' is used as a token by itself, then the string "ab!4" will be parsed as three tokens: "ab", "!", and "4".

Finally, you can specify which punctuation characters are illegal, which means they are not allowed to appear anywhere in an assembly language program except inside comments or strings.

The plus (+) and minus (-) characters have some special behavior. They are always legal as the first character of a number token but they can be symbol, token, or illegal characters otherwise. They cannot be the comment, pseudo, or label characters.

The "Apply" button applies the changes that have been made. The "Close" button closes the dialog. The "Help" button brings up this help window.