Answering msg from Bob Lawrence to Rowan_crowe,
on Thursday October 19 1995 at 07:56

 Ro>> I find it *useful* but *annoying*. I much prefer lowercase.

 BL>   It must be just me. In Pascal, I start off writing things like
 BL> SmallIntenger... and then I don't like the look of the l's and switch
 BL> to lower case the next time. I seem to run specials, so it's just as
 BL> well for VB to put it in upper case and have done with it. In fact,
 BL> I rather like the way that Delphi does in in bold.

In other IDEs such as Pascal or C you have keywords highlighted in a
different colour. Much better than mere capitalisation.

 Ro>> The automatic formatting is nice, though. (eg: "PRINT A%"
 Ro>> becomes "PRINT A%"). It was a bit of a surprise when I was

Heh, looks like you did your own auto-formatting, there were more spaces
between the first "PRINT" and "A%" (grin)

 Ro>> trying out the PowerBASIC demo: it doesn't fiddle with
 Ro>> capitalisation or spacing at all.

 BL>   I like that too...

One of these days I have to write a MoonRock IDE, and it will have that, as
an option of course.

 Ro>> I wrote a little util a while ago which extracts all the
 Ro>> elements of your source code: all keywords, variable names,
 Ro>> etc, and lists them once only (regardless of how many times
 Ro>> they appear in the source).

 BL>   What a good idea!

I will post the MoonRock source & executable (uuencoded) in the next message.

 Ro>> Then by sorting that list you can see immediately when you have
 Ro>> mis-spelt variable names. The problem with QB is that it's not
 Ro>> fussy: if you use Hello% somewhere and then Helo% somewhere
 Ro>> else, it will assume they are two quite different variables and
 Ro>> not complain. VB has an "OPTION EXPLICIT" which forces you to
 Ro>> declare all variables a la C/Pascal, which solves this problem.

 BL>   Yes. I never use it any other way. I am the master of the misspelled
 BL> variable. Without declarations, I end up with lots more than I expect.

When I ran ELEMENT over the source code for MoonRock (which is written in
Micro$oft VB/DOS) I picked up 3 mis-spelt variable names. It still
functioned, but just oddly at times. Those are the most difficult to pick
up, because the errors or effects they cause at runtime are subtle.

 Ro>> BTW, if you have VB/DOS standard, try this trick (no guarantees,
 Ro>> back up first) -+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+-- At offset
 Ro>> 00000210h, STD has 9FF3h, PRO has CD05h   [BC.EXE]

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

 BL>   Aaarrgh! I've got the PRO version of VB/DOS. Robbed again. I *hate*
 BL> Mickey!

Well, I've got myself a poor man's Pro version now. The libraries are
different I presume, to accomodate ISAM. Here's the size of the VB/DOS
standard libs:

spin     lib      17,433 19-08-92   23:59
vbdcl10  lib     628,151 19-08-92   23:59
87       lib       4,633 19-08-92   23:59
vbdrt10  lib      34,483 19-08-92   23:59
vbdos    lib       2,587 19-08-92   23:59
vbdosqlb lib      33,280 19-08-92   23:59
cmndlg   lib      49,687 19-08-92   23:59
        7 file(s)      770,254 bytes

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