The Sinclair QL Forum

Tim,

The default order of calculation is by column, but you can change that to row in the Defaults menu. See the QL Manual, which gives a comprehensive introduction to Abacus' workings.

Per

Tim, Im trying to find out how the BASICs work. Differences between the various flavours sometimes cause compatibility problems. At the same time, Id like to explore and exploit the advances, not be held back by conventions when there is a better way of doing something. Extending S*Basic is a partic...

So Ill kick off with with a continuation from a previous thread, "Command line parameters". I see a lot of programmers starting out with programming for Qdos/S*Basic, myself included, getting tangled in the RI stack, fetching and returning parameters, moving stuff around, padding strings, ...

Id like to explore differences between the various flavours of "QL" BASICs: SuperBASIC, MBASIC + MB and SBASIC and daughter BASICs. In this sense, QLib and Turbo could be considered dialects of QL BASIC. The reasons are: To better understand how they work, and as an aid to improving the qu...

Tobias, I believe Norman was referring to something that, for some reason, was a common misunderstanding in the early days, when we were all grappling to get to grips with Qdos. But as Norman has pointed out, there may be a method in a1's value on entry to a proc/fn after all. It may turn out to be ...

This is interesting stuff, Norman. I havent seen it documented before. But is this behaviour of a1 intentional? If it is replicated across MBasic and SBasic then good. If it only applies to Qdos JS, a suitable warning to that effect should be considered. IMHO software compatibility is very important...

In a case like this, after initialising the procedures, the machine is basically in a crashed state and anything could happen. I cant promise the fix will solve everything, but it is necessary and a good place to start

Martin, Just took a quick peek at your code, command_asm. The first thing that strikes me is that the procedure initialisation table is faulty. Id say that is the first thing to put right. It would explain all your symptoms. The problem is that the numbers of procedures and and functions are merely ...

Tobias, There are significant differences between the SBasic and SuperBasic designs (and, it would appear SBasic daughter Basics) but there doesnt appear to be any documentation. Perhaps we could have a thread exploring the differences between the various Basics? I started looking into SBasic 15 or ...

Martin_Head writes: The routine seems to work OK in the main SBASIC job (0), but I suspect I'm getting something wrong, because if I have daughter SBASIC job running, It's inclined to crash if I try to run a program in it, after executing my procedure. (or the whole system will crash) From the toolk...