Announcement

**Michael Torrie** · 16 Sep 2000, 05:17 PM

I agree that the editor is not the best, and used to wish for it to be worked on, I now go out and use a third-party editor. It's even possible to have a 3rd party editor run PBC.exe from within it, and give similar feedback as to errors, etc. It's been a long time since I was back in the windows world, so I can't recall which editor I used to use. (I think it was UltraEdit32 or something like that). It supported syntax hilighting and stuff like that. Very good program. Heck, you can even find support for BASIC in vi now (gvim at least).

(Slipping away to dreamland...) When PB/Linux comes out, I hope they allow support for traditional tools, such as gdb, rather than make their own debugger. Standard .o production would be nice too. (I've often wished for .obj output too -- I guess there were too many dependencies on PB runtime code to do that though.)

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**Tom Hanlin** · 18 Sep 2000, 11:21 AM

Unfortunately, we don't have a music division, but I'll pass your suggestions along to R&D.

Please don't keep repeating the same suggestions. We do hear you the first time.

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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff

**stephane fonteyne** · 18 Sep 2000, 01:09 PM

Originally posted by Tom Hanlin:
Unfortunately, we don't have a music division, but I'll pass your suggestions along to R&D.

Please don't keep repeating the same suggestions. We do hear you the first time.

Hi Tom,

I'm sorry for the repeating.
I have two questions when comes the next version of PBDOS with OOP support?
When comes the next version from PBDLL en PBCC

Next Wishlist for PBDOS:

1. DPMI support en Realtime support
2. preinitializating variabels and arrays
Example: DIM a AS INTEGER = 15
DIM tabel(1 TO 5) AS BYTE = (12,45,4,78,9)
3. Replace % to CONST
4. CONST parameters in FUNCTION and SUB
5. Support for the 16-bit assembler 80x87 instructionset
6. Smaller EXE's in DOS

Thats is it

Greetings,
stephane

Ps: Can you this whish to send R&B???

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**Lance Edmonds** · 18 Sep 2000, 09:51 PM

It is company policy not to preannounce products and/or features of unreleased products. You'll have to wait for the next upgrade begins shipping to find out what new features will be on offer. The only way you can get an advance look is to join the beta team, but conditions of entry to that elite "squad" are strict. Many apply for a position, but the number of places is limited.

I have one comment about your latest message... if you want all of these features added to the compiler, how likely will it be for the resultant EXE's to be made smaller? The current PB/DOS runtime module takes up a maximum of 64Kb (and is often less when unused RTL libraries are excluded) which is one aspect that helps give PB/DOS applications blazing speed. Adding a lot of seldom-used features to the compiler is not something that R&D are likely to do without good reason.

If you can offer some reasons behind each your requests to convince R&D to implement these features, and these reasons are convincing, then they stand a greater chance of being implemented.

For example, the functionality of a signed-byte data type can easily be implemented with the unsigned-BYTE data type along with other standard PB/DOS functions. For example: PRINT (x? - 127) gives a signed result. What sort of application do you feel would greatly benefit from this data type?

The same questions must be asked for some of the other suggestions too.

Finally, what is your background in programming, Stephane? What sort of applications do you write? Do you write/sell commercial software? Are you a programming professional or is programming just a hobby for you?

Thanks!

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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

**Alan Earnshaw** · 25 Sep 2000, 04:13 PM

"PRINT (x? - 127) gives a signed result."

Lance,

By that logic, we should get rid of all signed integer types. After all, PRINT (x?? - 32768) also gives a signed result. And since you can readily do your own formatted output, let's get rid of USING$. And who needs INPUT$, INPUT, and LINE INPUT when we have INKEY$? The list could go on, but my point is this: just because you can do something without having it built into the language does not make it a bad addition to the language.

I would also like to see signed, one-byte integers. It would make it easier to read and write certain kinds of binary file data.

Stephane,

"4. CONST parameters in FUNCTION and SUB"

They are already present. Just use BYCOPY in the declaration line, and the value passed to the function or procedure will never be modified:

Code:

SUB Test(BYCOPY x%)
  x% = x% - 3
END SUB

x% = 10
CALL Test(x%)
PRINT x%

One of your examples:

"DIM tabel(1 TO 5) AS BYTE = (12,45,4,78,9)"

gets really messy when you have multi-dimensional arrays:

DIM tabel(1:5, 1:5) AS BYTE = ????

Alan

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Alan C. Earnshaw
Information Management Systems, Inc.
http://www.infoms.com

**Lance Edmonds** · 27 Sep 2000, 03:36 AM

I would also like to see signed, one-byte integers. It would make it easier to read and write certain kinds of binary file data.

Alan, point taken, except I was really referring to the fact that the signed byte is the only "missing" data type right now, but what sort of binary data are *you* talking about here?

Try as I might, I cannot think of one single "real-world" use that I could employ (in my own applications) for this 'odd' data type. Given that 8 bit data sizes are inefficient in terms of CPU cycles, what did you have in mind for them?

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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

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