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Volume Number: 3
Issue Number: 7
Column Tag: Basic School
Almost a Fonts Menu for PCMac Basic 
By Dave Kelly, MacTutor Editorial Board
The months seem to be flying by and the major improvements to Basic that I have
been waiting for are still not released. There are some improvements which are worth
mentioning. This month I speak of improvements to the PCMacBasic compiler (now
version 2.01). It has been several months since I last spoke of PCMacBasic. The
authors were quite busy toward the end of last year finishing up other projects so
there wasn’t much progress to talk about. Now there have been some noteworthy
improvements, although there are still some weak areas which can and will probably
be corrected if we give them enough time.
The first improvement that I noticed was the manual now has a spiral binding.
The previous manual I had was stapled and not easy to handle. Documentation style has
not changed much, but there has been a little more explanation added to some sections.
I still have trouble finding things in it (there is no index). Since the manual is split
into two sections, General Information and Alphabetical List of Basic Commands, there
are two separate sets of page numbering (one for each). If you don’t know this you
could get lost easy if you are looking in the wrong half of the book. Most every section
contains more information than was presented in the old manual. However, I felt that a
novice user might have trouble understanding somethings the first time through.
LINE LABELS SUPPORTED
A major improvement to PCMacBasic is the ability to use line labels (as opposed
to line numbers) in your program source code. If the Line Labels box is checked in the
Compile dialog box, your Basic program may have alpha-numeric labels for lines as
well as integers. If the Line Labels box is checked, line numbers are considered to be
labels of digits. Up to 38 digits are allowed and compared. (When the Line Labels box is
not checked, line numbers must be 1 to 65534.) When compiling, each line label is
mapped to a line number when it is first encountered. That number is used in place of
the label by the compiler. An alpha-numeric label is mapped to the highest number
already used plus one. If the highest number, 65535, has already been used, then the
highest number available is used.
When the Line Label feature is used, all line labels, even all-digit labels, are
stored in the Symbol Table while compiling. This is slower and uses more memory for
each label than compiling with the Line Labels feature turned off. Programs with a
number on each line should be compiled with Line Labels off, or the numbers should be
removed from lines which are not entry points!
HFS SUPPORT
HFS support has been improved. The FILES$ functions return the full path
names as it should. However, The FILES$(PROGRAM) function returns only the name
of the program file and not the full path name even when the default path name is
another volume. This is better support than MS Basic provides, but it would be nice to
be able to find out where your application is located. (Note:see June 1987 MacTutor,
page 8, for the solution for MS Basic). My SCSI Hard Disk turns out to have a volume
number of -1 which is not mentioned in the manual (The manual states that hard disk
boot volume is drive number 3, pg. 23. This may refer to Apple HD20????).
TOOLBOX ACCESS
The (improved) PCMacBasic manual now has a better explanation of how to call
the toolbox from PCMacBasic. The remainder of this column will discuss the ‘method
to the madness’ of calling the toolbox.
It would certainly help you if you have had some experience working with an
assembler at some time in your life. It turns out that you don’t need to know how to do
assembly to call the toolbox if you know just a few basic assembler codes. Toolbox