Author Topic: ABB robot RAPID programming  (Read 19337 times)

theswede

  • Junior Community Member
  • Posts: 2
  • Hero Points: 0
ABB robot RAPID programming
« on: March 09, 2010, 09:14:17 AM »
We're a small automation company focusing on PLC and ABB robot programming in RAPID, as well as .NET programming. We're looking for a good editor which can leverage our ABB robot programming in RAPID, a language reminiscent of FORTRAN and BASIC, since we're getting spoiled with the nice features of the visual studio environment for .NET.

The language specification for RAPID is available, it's a procedural language with local and global scope. No object orientation, no polymorphism, the most advanced meta feature is that the program can be divided into modules (files) which can see each other on a global basis.

How hard would it be to adapt Slickedit to handle such a language, preferably with code completion and lookups (provided a whole project is loaded, of course)?

Graeme

  • Senior Community Member
  • Posts: 2793
  • Hero Points: 347
Re: ABB robot RAPID programming
« Reply #1 on: March 09, 2010, 11:24:13 AM »
Looks like there's a sophisticated RAPID editor here.

http://www.robedit.com/preview/index.html

I have no idea how hard it would be but there's a tutorial here on what to do

http://blog.slickedit.com/2008/05/tutorial-adding-language-support-to-slickedit/

RAPID looks vaguely similar to Modula2 or maybe pascal.  Slickedit has good support for pascal and a small amount of support for Modula2.  If you look at the slickedit macro file modula.e that comes with the editor, you might find some code you can borrow or learn from.  SlickC is a lot like C and not hard to learn if you know C or C++ (or Java or C# or...)

Graeme

theswede

  • Junior Community Member
  • Posts: 2
  • Hero Points: 0
Re: ABB robot RAPID programming
« Reply #2 on: March 10, 2010, 02:09:34 PM »
That editor, forgive me for saying so, doesn't appear very sophisticated.

Thank you for the pointer. Hadn't found that page when browsing through the site quickly before. Downloaded the trial version and trying to enter the RAPID syntax now. Seems to work fine so far. Have some work to do to figure out how to get autocompletion and code lookup working.