Eric Auer
Thu, 14 Oct 2004 19:44:33 -0700
Hi, I tested SmallBasic.sourceforge.net with some old QBASIC and GWBASIC .bas files, here a short list of things which did not work: KEY, DEFINT, DEFDBL, CLEAR, POKE, FILES, DO, "GOTO" as shorthand for "THEN GOTO" ... WIDTH, OUT, LPTINT, SHELL, " signs in REM lines (if non-balanced, which should not matter inside REMarks), SHELL, PALETTE, SCREEN, probably others.
Some things which do work are LOCATE and INKEY$ and INPUT$(1)... so I was able to run a short implementation of A.K.Dwedneys "Wator" toroidial planet with some fish, plancton and sharks, but got a stack underflow at some point. Although there are only 2 nested levels of GOSUB, no recursion at all. Some syntactic variants of OPEN are not supported by SmallBASIC. Feel free to forward this to some SmallBASIC forum or maintainer, or maybe even write some plugin / patch to improve compatibility (although the FAQ explicitly states that SmallBASIC is similar but not compatible to QBASIC). By the way, as SmallBASIC does not even support "name:" style labels, I assume you should better compare it to a 32bit GWBASIC... The DOS binary is 758k big but UPXes to 212 kilobytes.You might want to reanimate the BWBasic enhancement project as an alternative. BWBasic is an ugly (in terms of source code) BASIC with the enhanced syntax which you know from QBASIC and others but with only very few library functions. At some point, we started writing graphics / text mode / sound support for it, but the project never really reached an interesting level. As a side effect, you can now compile BWBASIC even in Turbo C 2 (but the Linux gcc version is "smoother"). PS: Both wired_gr and clarkg (addresses mentioned in the Changes file) bounced, but maybe you can mail riessb usa net (Bob Riess). Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: IT Product Guide on ITManagersJournal Use IT products in your business? Tell us what you think of them. Give us Your Opinions, Get Free ThinkGeek Gift Certificates! Click to find out more http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/guidepromo.tmpl _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user