Useful Programming Trick .. But 40 years late!

[Namir]

(01-18-2016 07:32 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Something along the lines of macros in assembly language, you could go further and write with the desired structures, in text, with a text editor, then have a program that replaces the structure commands with what you're proposing above, before TRANSFORMing to BASIC. I did something similar it order to get rid of the line numbers (the program that did the TRANSFORMing added them) and to have white space for readability, but did not think of taking it as far as forming such structures. I showed Geir an example of it when we met in L.A. a couple of years ago. The Paris users' group did have a module for the 71 that added multi-line IF...THEN...ELSE...ENDIF, CASE, and maybe some others, but I never got it.

In 1983 I was using BASICA on the IBM PC. I wrote a pre-processor program, which I called NBASIC, and published in in Dr Dobb's Journal. NBASIC read text files that had structured code with IF-THEN-ELSE, SELECT CASE, and SUBroutines (with parameters), and wrote BASICA-compliant code.

Namir