Announcement

**John Spikowski** · 21 Sep 1999, 10:42 PM

There is a set of registry functions available on the PB FTP site.

**George Bleck** · 22 Sep 1999, 05:43 AM

Thanks for the information John, but this is for Netscape's proprietary registry NSREG.DAT through LIBREG32.DLL

**Lance Edmonds** · 25 Sep 1999, 09:48 PM

You may want to consider offering payment for this kind of task George, you are more likely to get some offers of assistance.

In case you want to try it yourself, I'll give you a couple of hints: most of the declarations are expecting the parameters BYVAL, and those prefixed with an "*" are expecting a BYREF parameter. UINT32 is a LONG in PB, and UINT16 is an INT. CHAR is usually ASCIIZ, and ** means a pointer to a pointer (indirection).

Lance
PowerBASIC Support

**Bakulesh Thakker** · 23 Sep 2000, 03:41 PM

I am new PB programmer wanting to use PB as programming vehicle for my personal software. I am a 'C'-aware programmer so I can understand some of the things Lance is writing. But the reason why I reached this thread is because I searched for help on C to PB translation.

I have number of questions:

First I know that C expects parameter values passed "By Value". So it makes sense to prescribe variables in argument list with "*" to be translated as BYREF and other values BYVAL. But from what little C I know char * values are pointers heaxdecimal zero terminated character strings and a pointer to such values is passed BYVAL. So they should translate as ASCIIZ. But Lance says that even char types should be coded as ASCIIZ. Is this correct?

Secondly I wanted to know was this: Many API functions are translated as returning value DWORD whereas .H files show the type returned as <something> {FAR} *.

For example, consider following from WINSOCK.H (copied from CodeWarrior Lite):

struct servent FAR * PASCAL FAR getservbyname(const char FAR * name,
const char FAR * proto);

whereas in .inc file same function is shown as:

DECLARE FUNCTION getservbyname LIB "WINSOCK" (szName AS ASCIIZ, Proto AS ASCIIZ) AS DWORD

How am I going to access the components of struct servent knowing a DWORD value which is supposed to be a pointer to "struct servent" value? Do I use union?

Third thing I wanted to know is: is there some nice way to translate casting notation used in some C programme. Like for example (LONG)dwX.

I hope my query is considered appropriate here.

Thanks and regards,

-Bakulesh

**Florent Heyworth** · 23 Sep 2000, 04:59 PM

Hi Bakulesh

ASCIIZ are zero terminated strings, use them wherever you would
use char * or char[]. The STRING type used in PB corresponds
to the BSTR in C (SysAlloc* family).

The difference in return types is only apparent - PB supports
casting but in a different manner than C. Casting in PB is done
by assigning a return type to another as in (using the
getservbyname example):

Code:

LOCAL dwReturn AS DWORD
LOCAL ptServent AS servent PTR 'pointer to servent structure

dwReturn = getservbyname( "HTTP", "TCP" )
'cast the return value
ptServent = dwReturn

'alternatively (quicker and more succint) you could do:
ptservent = getservbyname( "HTTP", "TCP" )

... access the structure

The pointer notation is <DATATYPE> PTR. To get the address of
a variable use VARPTR(<DATATYPE> ) instead &<DATATYPE> as in C.

PowerBASIC is very flexible and offers UNION, UDTs and a host
of other features.

Hopefully this will be enough to get you started.

Cheers

Florent

------------------

Announcement

C to PB Conversion

C to PB Conversion

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment