brown@nicmad.UUCP (08/15/86)
[Manual writers. Feed me those manual writers!!!] Well, I called Microsoft today on three different things to do with the 2.0 version of the QuickBASIC compiler. 1. Turn to page 329. LINE INPUT # Statement This error has been there from the beginning of the regular BASIC manuals that come with the PC-DOS BASIC. In there is the sentence: "If a carriage-return-line-feed sequence is encountered, it is preserved. In other words, the carriage-return-line-feed characters are returned as part of the string." Well, that is not true. If you have a file that contains nothing but CR/LFs, you will get strings that contain null (length of 0). The CR/LFs are thrown away. I did a test with the interpreter BASIC and indeed got null strings, not strings with CR/LFs. Just think about it. If a string contained the CR/LF that was in the file and you did a PRINT or PRINT#, you would get 2 CR/LF sequences. Not exactly what you would expect. 2. Turn to page 453. SCREEN Statement; table 11.7 Can you make any sense out of that table? When it somes to a mono- chrome display on a monochrome display adapter board, this table doesn't even come close to telling you what the color combinations will do for foreground/background. One has to use the PC BASIC manual (COLOR Statement) to get any idea at all. BTW, the IBM BASIC manual has a couple of errors in that listing as well, but is MUCH closer to what really happens. Does anyone understand what the NUMBER column under MONOCHROME DISPLAY really means? The Microsoft person said that is was supposed to be a color number. But, for monochrome display and adapter, it doesn't make any sense. She agreed that these tables are hard to understand and will turn in a report to the manual people. But, in the meantime, if anyone understands what the tables are saying, could you let me know via e-mail. 3. Turn to page 542. D.3.1 Linking with the BRUN20.LIB Library. In the second paragraph from the top, the last sentence says: "With the alternate library BCOM20.LIB, COMMON is not supported; CHAIN is equivalent to RUN." The beginning of this paragraph is talking about COMMON and CHAIN support. This paragraph gives the impression that COMMON is not supported at all with the BCOM20.LIB library. That is not true. Sense CHAIN is not supported with BCOM20.LIB, COMMON can't be used with CHAINs. But, COMMON can be used when programs are linked together, as with the RBBS BBS program. As a last note, in the past some users have tried to get subroutine programs to work with QuickBASIC, but kept getting SB errors. The author of RBBS found (after making MANY phone calls to Microsoft) that the SB errors can be ignored. But, with the 2.0 version, the error checking has been changed and any errors can't be ignored. So, the subroutine code for RBBS has been changed so that it will compile with the 2.0 version. If anyone would like a copy of the RBBS subroutine code (it isn't short) to see how it was done, ie, error checking in subroutines, let me know and I will ship it to you. I guess that this is it for now. -- ihnp4------\ harvard-\ \ Mr. Video seismo!uwvax!nicmad!brown topaz-/ / decvax------/