Tabspace utility for 
               CP/M-80 Kermit (Kermit-80) support.

I have written this utilty simply to help me.  No other excuses.

I am forever getting updates or new systems to add to the CP/M-80 
version of Kermit (Kermit-80) from folk who send me these updates 
via  Electronic  Mail.   I  am thankful that it is already  in  a 
machine readable form.

However,  our  Mutton-head  mainframe substitutes a single  space 
character  for every tab character it receives,  so a lot of  the 
submissions  need  considerable massaging before I  can  actually 
merge these additions to the rest of Kermit-80.

Therefore,  I issued Kermit-80 with all tabs replaced by  spaces, 
in  the  hope that any further doantions have spaces  instead  of 
tabs.   Unfortunately,  this  does  not  work  in  practice,  and 
everyone is complaining about the size of the source files (often 
as  much  as  30% larger as a single tab character is now  up  to 
eight space characters!)

So  I wrote this program in the hope that people submitting stuff 
to  me run their sources through this de-tabber to make  my  life 
easier.

As  a bonus,  TABSAPACE will do the reverse,  and replace  spaces 
with tabs.  With a couple of exceptions...  (See below)

To  run  the  program,  type TABSPACE and wait  for  the  sign-on 
message   ("Tabspace loaded,  Version 1 22-Jan-87"   for the time 
being).  Tabspace will ask for the filename to be "massaged", and 
whether  you  want  to expand or compress  files  (ie  substitute 
spaces for tabs, or tabs for spaces respectively).  

Once  started,  it will plough through the file specified (if  it 
exists)  and apply the tabs/spaces replacement as  required.   It 
will also strip out any parity bits.

Tabspace  actually opens two files when it works:  one input file 
of  the  type <filename>.<extention> as specified  by  you.   The 
second is the same <filename> but with a $$$ extention.

Once  the  file  has been massaged,  the original  file  will  be 
deleted,  and the .$$$ file renamed to your original file.   This 
should  be relatively safe,  as you will not get to the stage  of 
delete  and  rename  if  you  have disk  space  or  file  closing 
problem.   However, I suggest you try applying Tabspace to COPIES 
of your software!

Couple of other points:
Tabspace   uses  memory  to  buffer  several  logical  128   byte 
"sectors",  both on read and writing.   An equate for MAXRAM sets 
the maximum amount of memory available to Tabspace after CP/M and 
Tabspace itself have nabbed their memory,  and is initally set to 
16  Kbytes.   (I reasoned that if you are going to run  Kermit-80 
version  4.08  or later you should have at least this  amount  of 
free  memory!)  If you have more memory,  you can adjust this  to 
some larger value,  say 52 for a 62k system (ie 62K - 8k (CP/M) - 
2k (Tabspace) = 52k)

I used the Public Domain assembler LASM to assemble  Tabspace;  I 
have no idea if any other assembles will work.   Anyway,  LASM is 
the ONLY assembler now used for Kermit-80 assembly.

Tabspace  will expand tabs after a semicolon in a comment  field, 
but will not replace tabs for multiple spaces after a  semicolon.  
I ran into som real problems early on, and decided that spaces in 
comment fields would be ok, so I left it in.

Any  comments  or  contributions for  Tabspace  and/or  Kermit-80 
please send them to me (with tabs expanded!) as:


OBSchou @ UK.AC.LOUGHBOROUGH.MULTICS                   or

Kermit @ UK.AC.LOUGHBOROUGH.MULTICS                    or

Bertil Schou,
The Computer Centre,
Loughborough Universirty of Technology,
Loughborough,
Leics. LE11 3TU                                        or

+ 509 -222313 (Direct Dial)



Many thanks for your co-operation,  

Bertil Schou.