Anyone recall why QB64 was made to do this?...

[Pete]

Code: (Select All)

For i = 21 To 30

    Locate i, 1

    Print i;

    Sleep

Next 

Press a key and after it reaches to bottom of the page, the next key changes the screen to a 50-width (or appears to do so) and cuts the font size in half.

In QB, it apparently just errors out.

Anyway, just curious, as much of QB64 was made to mimick QuickBASIC, and this came up from a post by an old acquaintance at the QB Forum. He found QB was not able to correctly PCOPY in 50-line width mode. Now it does in QB64, but I'd consider that the fixing of a QB bug.

Pete

[SMcNeill]

If you remember, back in the day, Galleon used to ask every so often how the people using the project wanted certain things to behave.

"QB45 will toss an overflow error if a number is outside the bounds of a variable type...  Do we want to replicate this, or change it to just overflow and keep going?"  <-- I remember this was one of those deliberate conversations and the user base chose to ignore QB45-compatibility and go with the overflow solution.

The LOCATE issue was just another one of those same things that he took public opinion on.  "Do we just want to automatically error this out, or change to _FONT 8 instead and swap to the extra rows?"

From what I recall, almost nobody had an opinion on the subject except for Clippy -- "WTF ERROR WHEN IT DOESN'T NEED TOO?!!!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT"S STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"   And, since most people thought Clippy was just mildly rabid and didn't care enough to argue about it, that was the choice Galleon ended up going with.

And that's the history behind the "WHY" in this instance. 

[Pete]

Well there's a story I wish I could unread.  

Flippy and his Rabid Response Team.

Now the real question. Who has found an actual non-bad coding use for it? While I do agree on some of the departures from QB, as the PCOPY one I mentioned because that fixed a bug, It's hard to swallow the only thing that departure was good for, shutting up Flippy. Oh, now I get it.

Pete

[SMcNeill]

I honestly can't imagine any legitimate usage for it.  If you're going to use over 25 rows, and you know it, then WHY wouldn't you just set the screen size or _Font yourself rather than go through that nasty automatic resize of both?

But, it is what it is now, and after ... what?  20 years of QB64 code being generated with it the way it is??  It'd just be something to break someone's bad code, if we changed it now.

It's odd how our mission statement has changed, in many ways, from a simple:  "QB64, where we strive to emulate QB45 code on modern systems."  

Nowadays, we've been around so long, it seems our goal is:  "QB64PE -- where we strive to maintain QB64 functionality, and emulate QB45 code on modern systems."

For good or ill, Galleon made a lot of these choices for the language, and they are what they are now.  Changing them would only break existing code, and that's never our goal, if we can avoid it at all.

[Pete]

I agree. +1 for knowing the story, behind it.

Pete