Answering msg from Bob Lawrence to Rowan_crowe,
on Saturday October 14 1995 at 07:58

 Ro>> MoonRock has similar syntax to BASIC but is internally more
 Ro>> elegant and simple (and fast). If anyone's interested:

 BL>   Clever you...

Why thank you, kind sir.

 BL>> Personally, I don't find it very annoying to have to swap
 BL>> syntax every time I write in a different language. What I
 BL>> *would* find annoying is having to get the case right (as well
 BL>> as the spelling), and that's the way BASIC is (like the
 BL>> annoying curly braces for comments in Pascal instead of
 BL>> something easy).

 Ro>> What are you going on about Bob! As I read the above you're
 Ro>> suggesting that M$ BASIC will not accept lowercase keywords?
 Ro>> Incorrect.

 BL>   No... I meant that the VB editor puts the functions in upper case
 BL> for you. I find that very useful as a way of knowing if I spelt it
 BL> wrong.

I find it *useful* but *annoying*. I much prefer lowercase. The automatic
formatting is nice, though. (eg: "PRINT   A%" becomes "PRINT
A%"). It was a bit of a surprise when I was trying out the PowerBASIC
demo: it doesn't fiddle with capitalisation or spacing at all.

 Ro>> That's given me a great idea! I am working on the IDE for
 Ro>> MoonRock. If it comes across something it doesn't understand,
 Ro>> it will suggest keywords which are close to that spelling,
 Ro>> using an algorithm similar to soundex. eg: "Rowan Crowe",
 Ro>> "Rowen Crowe", "Rowan Crow" all produce the
same soundex code.

 BL>   I'm not sure that would help much. Writing code, it's not the sound
 BL> (most of it doesn't even have vowels), it's transposed letters or
 BL> things like StrLng instead of StrsLong.

Good point. However, it could also be used to trace similarly named
variables. I wrote a little util a while ago which extracts all the
elements of your source code: all keywords, variable names, etc, and lists
them once only (regardless of how many times they appear in the source).
Then by sorting that list you can see immediately when you have mis-spelt
variable names. The problem with QB is that it's not fussy: if you use
Hello% somewhere and then Helo% somewhere else, it will assume they are two
quite different variables and not complain. VB has an "OPTION
EXPLICIT" which forces you to declare all variables a la C/Pascal,
which solves this problem.

 BL>   My favourite editor is VB, but Delphi's not bad.

I like VB's IDE, pretty good, although it's a bit sluggish sometimes when
compared to QB's IDE (due to overlays most likely). But then it's a bigger
and more complex program.

BTW, if you have VB/DOS standard, try this trick (no guarantees, back up first)

-------------------------------
        At offset 00000210h, STD has 9FF3h, PRO has CD05h   [BC.EXE]

        Similarly, the VBDOS.EXE IDE is the same length for both
versions, and has exactly the same byte difference, this time at offset
00006B10h.
-------------------------------

Looks like the boys at MickeySoft don't know how to #IFDEF their code too
well ... there's only 2 bytes difference between the pro and standard
versions!

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