12-03-2022, 12:12 PM
All I'm going to say is...
look at "QB64.BAS" out of the last SDL version. About the first 500 LOC or so have a bunch of variable declarations and/or assignments being mixed with executable statements. Compared to that, thousands of "DATA" statements is a wall that cannot be helped. It's better than using "zlib" compression like one of Dav's utilities, only for the sake of readability, but some insecure people want to make sure things cannot be read easily. Such as the ones requesting image and sound files embedded into Windows EXE's or the equivalent of the two popular Unix-like operating systems.
I'm sorry if I misled people while I said somewhere Freebasic allowed multiline strings, it doesn't, not even with its "macros". If any BASIC dialect had to support something like the "here strings" in Bash shell language, it might represent the end of readability without "REM" statements. It's because people are going to want to "pickle", to obfuscate and to do all sorts of wicked schemes with data which resides inside code.
look at "QB64.BAS" out of the last SDL version. About the first 500 LOC or so have a bunch of variable declarations and/or assignments being mixed with executable statements. Compared to that, thousands of "DATA" statements is a wall that cannot be helped. It's better than using "zlib" compression like one of Dav's utilities, only for the sake of readability, but some insecure people want to make sure things cannot be read easily. Such as the ones requesting image and sound files embedded into Windows EXE's or the equivalent of the two popular Unix-like operating systems.
I'm sorry if I misled people while I said somewhere Freebasic allowed multiline strings, it doesn't, not even with its "macros". If any BASIC dialect had to support something like the "here strings" in Bash shell language, it might represent the end of readability without "REM" statements. It's because people are going to want to "pickle", to obfuscate and to do all sorts of wicked schemes with data which resides inside code.