PsL Monthly 1993 December/PSL Monthly Shareware CD-ROM (December 1993).iso/prgmming/dos/basic/tutorqb.com/TUTOR-01.BAS

BASIC Source File | 1986-12-03 | 14.0 KB | 270 lines

'                        The QuickBASIC Tutorial Series

'                                   Part 1
'                            The QuickBASIC Editor

'                        Copyright 1986  Ford Software

'                             4845 Willowbend Blvd
'                               Houston, TX 77035
'                                 [phone]
'                           CompuServe ppn: 71355,470

'This Tutorial may not be copied or distributed in any form - printed, on disk
'or electronically - without the express written permission of Ford Software.
'          Unlicensed distribution is a violation of copyright law
'           and may be subject to civil and criminal prosecution.

'QuickBASIC is the registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.
'Ford Software is not associated in any way with the Microsoft Corporation.

'(Make sure NumLock is off and press PgDn)
'page 2
'                           I N T R O D U C T I O N

'Congratulations! You have purchased one of the best programming environments
'this author has had the pleasure to have used. Oh sure, it has its quirks and
'design flaws - even bugs. But none of its shortcomings can seriously detract
'from its many advantages to the BASIC programmer. Please keep that in mind
'if we seem to be overly critical (even sarcastic) at times.

'QB2's documentation may seem imposing. That's because it is intended more as
'a reference book than as a tutorial for learning programming. Our tutorial
'will both guide you through the manual in a logical order and provide an
'interactive tutorial for immediate reinforcement of what you have read.

'If you should happen to accidentally erase some lines in one of the tutorial
'files, just reload the file. To do this, press Alt-F, L, Enter, and enter
'the name of the tutorial file shown at the top of this screen. You will be
'asked if you want to save the changes you made to this file. Of course you
'do not, but convincing QB2 is tough. Use the Tab key to highlight the NO
'box and press the space bar - DO NOT PRESS THE ENTER KEY.

'(Press PgDn)
'page 3
'                                 Contents
'                 page
'                  4     The Editor's Screen
'                  5     The Keyboard
'                  6     ..Restoring a Changed Line
'                  6     ..Cut and Paste
'                  7     ..Copying
'                  7     ..Deleting Whole Lines
'                  8     The Menu
'                  8     ..Edit
'                  8     ..File
'                  9     ..View
'                  9     ..Search
'                 10     ....Change
'                 11     ..Run (Compiling and Running)
'                 12     Review
'
' There is no index. To search for a topic, press Ctrl-F and enter the word.
'
'
'(Press PgDn)
'page 4
'                            The Editor's Screen

'If you have an EGA card and had it in the 43-line mode when you started QB2,
'you should be seeing 43 lines now. That's fine most of the time (though when
'you run a program, it will only use the top 25 lines of the screen), but this
'tutorial has been formatted for the 25-line mode, so return to DOS and change
'to that mode.

'Now, notice the right side of the screen frame. If you have a color monitor,
'the frame should be green with a black mark somewhere on it. The black mark
'indicates graphically where you are in the program code. Press Ctrl-PgUp to
'move to the top of the file, and you will see the mark at the top of the
'right frame. At the end of the file, the mark will be at the bottom. Right
'now it should be about 25% of the way down the side, indicating we are about
'25% of the way through the file.

'The mark at the bottom of the screen shows you your position relative to the
'maximum line length of 255 characters. However, you should try to limit lines
'to 80 characters or less so that you don't accidentally miss seeing anything.

'(Press PgDn)
'page 5
'                                The Keyboard

'The Editor's use of the keyboard really takes some getting used to. If you
'normally leave your NumLock key off, you won't have as much trouble as those
'who normally leave NumLock on and use the shift key when they want to move
'the cursor. You will need to leave it off for easy use of the cut and paste
'features of QB2.

'The status of the NumLock, CapsLock and ScrollLock keys are displayed on the
'right side of the bar at the top of the screen. (ScrollLock does nothing.)

'The next quirk of the editor is that it does not have an overstrike mode. In
'other words, you are in the "insert" mode all the time. This seems like a
'needless limitation and hopefully one that MS will fix in future versions.

'Using the cursor keys, move the cursor to right here --> .
'Press the Home key and move to the start of the line. Also try the End key
'and the Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right keys to move a word at a time. Ctrl-home
'moves the cursor to the top of the screen; Ctrl-End, to the bottom.
'Ctrl-PgUp moves to the start of the file and Ctrl-PgDn to the end.
'Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down scroll the screen a line at a time.     (press PgDn)
'page 6                     (Keyboard, continued)

'RESTORING A CHANGED LINE:
'With the cursor right here -->. hold Ctrl and press D to delete to the end of
'the line. Without moving the cursor, press the Ins key to restore the deleted
'text. Since QB2 doesn't have an overtype mode you will be using Ctrl-D a lot.
'Holding the Shift key down and pressing Esc would also restore the deleted
'text, but this key combination has an even more important feature.

'Put the cursor on this line. Type in some new characters and delete others.
'Then press Shift-Esc and the original line will be restored. You must press
'Shift-Esc before you move the cursor from the line you want to restore.

'CUT-AND-PASTE:
'One of the handiest features of the QB2 editor is the cut-and-paste feature.
'With NumLock off and the cursor on this line, hold down the Shift key and
'press the Up cursor. The two lines above will be highlighted. Press the Del
'key and the lines will disappear. Press the Ins key and they will return.
'You can highlight large blocks at a time using Shift and PgUp or PgDn. You
'can highlight a word by pressing Shift-Ctrl-Left/Right, or to the end of a
'line with Shift-End. After highlighting text, you can un-highlight it by
'pressing any cursor key but the Del key, or by pressing Esc.        (PgDn)
'page 7                     (Keyboard, continued)

'COPYING:
'In addition to moving text with the Del and Ins keys, you can copy it without
'deleting the original text. With the cursor here -->. press Shift-UpCursor.
'Now press F2 instead of Del. The text will remain highlighted until you press
'another key, then it will return to normal, but it is ready to be copied. (It
'would be less confusing if it returned to normal as soon as F2 is pressed,
'but don't let that distract you.) Put the cursor at the start of the next
'line and press the Ins key.

'DELETING WHOLE LINES:
'If you copied the lines per the instructions in the previous paragraph, you
'now have a couple of lines above that we don't want. To get rid of them,
'place the cursor on the line to be deleted and press Ctrl-Y.  This non-
'mnemonic key combination is evidently a curious bow to WordStar - "curious"
'because nothing else about the editor resembles WordStar. Oh, well...

'You can also delete a line by just holding down the Del key until all the
'characters on the line are gone, at which point the line itself will go away.
'Again, you can restore a deleted line by pressing the Ins key. Only the last
'line deleted or the last block "cut" can be restored.               (PgDn)
'page 8
'                                  The Menu
'EDIT:
'All the cut, paste and copy functions we have been examining can be accessed
'by seleting "Edit" from the menu at the top of the screen. To do this, hold
'the Alt key and press E. A menu of options will pop down. All of the commands
'in the Edit menu can be invoked by pressing "shortcut" keys which we have
'been using up until now, such as the Del key to cut, F2 to copy, etc.

'FILE:
'In contrast to the Edit menu, none of the File menu options can be invoked by
'pressing shortcut keys. To get to the File menu, you must press Alt-F. You
'can then select an option by moving the cursor with the cursor keys and
'pressing Enter or by entering the first letter of the desired command and
'pressing Enter. If two commands in the same menu start with the same letter,
'press the letter twice. To get to the File menu, you must press Alt-F.

'Unlike the BASIC interpreter, QB2 will prompt you to save your file if you
'tell it to Load a new file, start a New file or Quit without saving your file
'It's the cumulative effect of QB2's many time-saving and work-saving features
'such as this one that makes QB2 so terrific.
'   (PgDn)
'page 9                      (The Menu, continued)

'VIEW:
'The Options function lets you do away with the menu bar and other such things
'on the screen. After a while, you should be able to live without most of the
'frills on the screen and enjoy being able to see three more lines of code per
'screen. The Options function also lets you change screen colors.

'The Errors option erases the Error message block that takes up a lot of the
'screen when your program hits a snag or if you even just do a Ctrl-Break. It
'is a little annoying to have to do an Alt-V, E, Enter to clear off the error
'message every time you Ctrl-Break out of a program, but it's nothing major.

'SEARCH:
'The Find function is very useful in quickly moving to subroutines, etc. The
'first option, "Find...", doesn't seem to do anything that the next function,
'"Find selected text", doesn't do and the latter has two advantages. One is
'that if you have highlighted (selected) text on one line, it will be the text
'to be searched for. The other is that Ctrl-F is a hot key for Find Selected.
'and the regular Find has no hot key.  Ctrl-F can also be used in place of
'Find Next (F3) if doing consecutive Find's.
'   (PgDn)
'page 10                 (The Menu, Search continued)

'Put the cursor here -> . and press Ctrl-F and type in 'and' as the word to
'search for. The word here- should be highlighted. Press Ctrl-F again and the
'next "and" will be highlighted. Remember that if text is highlighted and you
'start typing over it, the entire highlighted text will disappear at once, so
'be careful. To un-highlight the text, press ESC or a cursor-movement key.

'CHANGE:
'This is another major feature that interpretive BASIC does not have: a search
'and replace function. Change the name of a variable throughout your program
'with just a few keystrokes. Place the cursor here ->. and press Alt-S, C, and
'press Enter. For the word to be replace, type "and" (without the quotes) and
'press the TAB key (not Enter!) to get down to the next line and enter "&" to
'replace "and", then press Enter. The first "and" will be highlighted. Press
'the space bar. The change will be made and the next "and" will be highlighted.
'You can either TAB over to the "cancel" command and press space bar, or press
'ESC to abort the process. Press Alt-S, C and Enter to view the replace screen
'again so that you can see some of the other options. One option is to make
'all the replacements without verifying with you. Pretty dangerous. Another
'is to make the replace "case" or "whole-word" sensitive. Pretty handy.
'  (PgDn)
'page 11                     (The Menu, continued)

'RUN:
'We have seen that there are often several ways to do the same thing in QB2,
'just as there are in the BASIC language. The same is true when you want to
'Compile your code and Run it. You can press Alt-R, then C, Enter to compile
'your code and then press Ctrl-R to run it. Or you can just press Ctrl-R to
'start with and QB2 will automatically compile the code and run it when it is
'through. If you want to change some of the compile-time options, press Alt-R
'and C. Now you must press C again to get to the next option that starts with
'that letter, then press Enter. Go ahead and do that now. If you don't make it
'to the compile-time option screen, press ESC and try again: Alt-R, C, C, Ent.

'Use TAB  |    If you press Enter when the Compile screen comes   | Use cursor
'+ space  |    up, this program will compile. Go ahead and try    | to change
'bar to   |    it. Then press Ctrl-R to run it.                   | options on
'select   |                                                       | this side
'options  |    If you want to run the program again and haven't   | and press
'on this  |    made any changes to the code, you can do so with-  | TAB when
'side.    |    out re-compiling. Just press Ctrl-R again.         | done.

cls:locate 12,39:print "HI!":end                                  '(PgDn)
'page 12                            Review

'Cursor movement:
'Try out all the cursor movement keys one more time: the Up and Down arrows;
'Ctrl-Up and -Down to scroll the screen a line at a time; Ctrl-left and -right
'to move a word at a time; Home to move to the start of a line and End to the
'end of a line; Ctrl-Home to move to the top-left of the screen and Ctrl-End
'move to the bottom left of the screen. In my opinion, this is all more effi-
'cient than leaving the keyboard to use a mouse, so we have ignored the mouse
'in this tutorial. However, I have heard other people say they think it is
'wonderful and makes QB2 easier to use. If you are a mouse user, you should
'have no trouble figuring out how to use it with QB2.

'Shortcut keys:
'Ctrl-R to compile and run the program.  Ctrl-F to find text.
'F2 to store highlighted text for copying.  Del to delete highlighted text.
'Ins to copy F2'ed text or recall Deleted text.  Shift-ESC to abort changes.
'F6 to see next error message.  Alt-V,E to get rid of the error message box.

'If you are ready to move on to the next session, press Alt-F, L, Enter, and
'enter TUTOR-02.
'                             the end of lesson 1




'end of file - press PgUp