About time some conditional execution features were added to Mach - I found to my horror today that even the latest release does not support even the most basic of conditional functions.
I really cant believe that in this day and age we're reduced to the equivalent of trying to programme the internet in Assembler and doing web page graphics by manually setting every bit in a bitmap image - this sort of thing went out over 30 years ago in the rest of the computing world.
Every other 'dialect' of gcode supports these functions, and to be taken seriously in the future Mach needs to support at least the obvious capabilities - 'IF-THEN-ELSE' and 'DO WHILE' along with the logical comparison functions (GT, GE, LT, LE, NE, EQ).
I need to machine some parts that have repetitive reatures and thus simple to do in a loop - six lines of code - but bloat to a couple of hundred lines if I have to expand it out manually. Yuk. Not to mention the vastly increased chances of an error (typo) and additional maintenance overhead.
Named variables (rather than #1 etc) would not go amiss either. Collectively these changes would at least bring Mach up to par with 1970's programming languages - and maybe sometime we might even catch up with the 21st Century!
Rick