OT: Power Basic bargain

That's a lot of work to save $100. Fine if you want to play with Windows. When I want to crunch some engineering numbers, I don't want to hassle with the asynchronous Windows interface.

Most of my programs have devolved to a screen of prompts for single-letter keystrokes. like...

C set Capacitance

T set Timestep

G Go

H Help

Q Quit

where hitting C would institute a prompt for some capacitance.

John

One of the first routines that I usually end up writing in any new window-based programming environment is the canonical "log window" so that I can get "print" back! I've done this in Visual BASIC, MFC, wxWidgets, etc., and it's well worth it -- the alternative, where peopple pop up a message box for any error or status or whatever, becomes *incredibly* annoying when there's a whole bunch of cascading failures or whatever and you're sitting there clicking through a dozen message boxes.

That's right. Regardless of hardware and environment, programming starts with the development of basic means for input and output.

VLV

INPUT "How many fish do you want?", FISH

PRINT "You can only have ", FISH/2

John

I can't deny the attractiveness of the simplicity there. :-)

The Windows approach does get you an automatic history with scrollbars and usually very easy font/color changes and complete clipboard access, but I would have to admit that the price for all that is often a little steep for simply-minded utility programs.

In PowerBasic ConsoleCompiler you can do some clipboard stuff. You can highlight text in the console window with the mouse and right-click to copy it to the clipboard. And you can paste text from elsewhere into an INPUT prompt, which is handy for pasting command strings, file names, like that.

John

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My aim wasn't just saving the dough, but to try PowerBasic and have the full range of options w.r.t. producing Win apps for current computers.

So, grabbing the PB/Win 8.0 to test drive for $49 seemed reasonable. It also might make sense later to buy PB/CC.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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PowerBasic.com's feature comparison list

says their Console Compiler doesn't support INPUT.

Is the list wrong?

That was one of the things that counted against getting PB/CC--it looked like I'd have to do my own i/o anyhow, so PB/Win it was.

James

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That's what I've already done crudely, as you can see. I'll just roll that up into a subroutine, call it "JPRINT" or some such, and that should be the end of it. My own PB/Win+CC.

I won't become a Windows GUI-master unless and until I need it, and should that time come, I'll be set for that too.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

That's weird. The HELP documents INPUT, INPUT #, and LINE INPUT. It seems to work fine.

DEFSNG A-Z FUNCTION PBMAIN () AS LONG

PRINT "Hello, world!" INPUT "How many fish do you want", FISH PRINT "That will cost $"; USING$("###.##", FISH * 2.99) SLEEP 2000

END FUNCTION

It also supports single-key input INKEY$ and a bunch of neat input buffer functions, like character counts and INPUT FLUSH.

The TCP functions let you do prints and inputs on sockets.

John

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Looks like that supported-functions list is just wrong. Kewl. INPUT$ is also one of my faves.

The PB/CC page says it supports INPUT, but that wasn't clear--my version, PB/Win, also supports INPUT, but only from files, not from the keyboard, AFAICT.

James