At 12:20 AM 4/20/2002 -0400, you wrote: >I don't see that really to be a problem. However I remember reading >somewhere about George wanting to solve this. It's like not loading >QLib_run! The thing is that Turbo being around for so long (from the time >of Supercharge) it has an impressive amount of code templates that do the >trick. And George updates it extremely often. What was the last time >Q-Liberator was updated? Additionally being restrictive in some aspects I >believe that is a feature. By being very strict programmers are forced to >write "clean" programs
Given that Simon Goodwin wrote TURBO (and He and I got a chance to sit and talk tech a few years back when he was a house guest), TURBO was designed with certain "opinions" that Simon had about how he felt programming should take place. I agreed with most of his opinions except that I felt that each one had some well justified exceptions. He felt that extensions (libraries) should be loaded at startup (from a boot file) so that all programs could use them. This also allows them to be updated without affecting the executable (sort of like updating a Window .dll file or a Unix library file). This is fine, except that most of the licenses for commercial extensions said that if you linked the extension into the program, you don't need to pay a license fee. If you want to make the extension loadable at boot time, you had to pay a license fee. Sort of made it difficult to write freeware programs that used commercial extensions. I'm not faulting Simon for any of this. I too have my own opinion about programming and tools. I do fine that Qlib has worked better into my opinions, but I'm trying to get my opinions and TURBO to meet half way. One example of my opinion is that I prefer tools that produce code or some file that can be edited later if you wish to tweak things. The tool BasConfig (for creating Config Blocks for SB programming) is OK to create a Config Block, but it does not allow you to edit a definition and expand on it (say, adding another Config Item). I wrote FileConfig to get around this. The user creates a definition file for the Config Block (using an editor). The Config Block definition is run through FileConfig and out pops a new Config Block (binary file). You need to add another Item? Edit the file, run it through FileConfig and, bingo, a new item is added. With BasConfig you have to start from scratch each time. This can add up if you have 20-50 Config items. Tim Swenson
