Wishlist for PB DOS: Macros

[Jack Nordby]

I haven't been using PowerBasic much lately so I may be out of
touch. Anyway, if you folks are still planning on upgrading
PB DOS, I'd like to suggest MACROS like are on the new PB/CC
and PB Win products. These really open up lots of possibilities
in those other new products.



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Jack N.

[Lance Edmonds]

Thanks Jack! You can almost bet that R&D look to our Windows compiler range for ideas and inspiration for new PB/DOS features, since the vast majority of new features in those compilers came directly out of customer requests, and there are loads of things that would be of benefit to PB/DOS programmers!

In any case, we never turn down an offer of a suggestion or three! (unless you want to file a request for OOP, et al, in which case we've had that already!)



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

[Jack Nordby]

That's what I love so much about PowerBASIC products; the whole
philosophy of providing what the users want. Also there is an
infectious enthusiasm about providing new and previously unknown
features that I just "gotta have". I had started with QuickBasic
but went to PB 3.2 when I saw PowerBasic had many more features.
That's why I jumped at the chance to get PB/CC once I obtained
Win 95.

Anyway, one other thing that I recall from when I was making
heavy use of PB 3.5: I often would set breakpoints to stop the
program at certain points to check the values of variables. My
practice was to continually rename the program about every 10
minutes or so in order to be able to try out code ideas without
losing the older tested versions. For example, I might rename it
pbore_a, pbore_b, pbore_c, and so on, keeping a sequence that way,
and later erase all the older versions.

The problem I often encountered was that when I saved the source
code under a new name, I would forget to release the breakpoints
from the old program, and when I tried to run the latest
version, the PB 3.5 IDE would put me back in the older version
where the breakpoints were still set, and sometimes after
releasing all the old breakpoints, I'd forget to put myself back
in the latest version. The result of this would be: I would
have two versions of the program, with some new code in one,
and some differing new code in the other.

I'm not sure of what might be affected here, but my suggestion
here would be, once I had saved the older version, and am
running a newer version, that PB IDE not put me back into the
older version just for the purpose of releasing the old
breakpoints; maybe it could instead save the old breakpoints
but inactivate them while I was running the newer version.
Or maybe it could simply ask me if I wished to release all
the old breakpoints while leaving me in the newest version.


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Jack N.

[Lance Edmonds]

Clearing all the existing breakpoints is a simple matter of pressing ALT+B,C.

Changing the way this behaves might upset more folks than we please (since they may rely on, or simply be used to the existing behavior), however, I'll pass your request to R&D to add to the wish list.

Thanks!

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