Programming

This week I decided to get back into the swing of things with regards to programming with PowerBASIC. Previously I'd been giving myself a course on Win32 programming with PowerBASIC for Windows without gaining much headway. Not only was I having to learn a programming language, but I was forced to learn the Win32 API at the same time in order to make use of the language in the first place! Not good for a budding programmer, so after some trial and error I settled with the PowerBASIC Console Compiler. I was able to come up with a simple game quickly since the syntax is very similar QBASIC.

' This is a simple guessing game. All you need to do is guess a number between 1 and 10.
' Written by Chris on 3-5-2007 @ 1:07PM CDT version 1.3

#COMPILE EXE
#DIM ALL

FUNCTION PBMAIN () AS LONG

    DIM rand AS INTEGER
    DIM guess AS INTEGER

    RANDOMIZE TIMER
    rand% = RND(1,10)

    LoopBack:
    PRINT "I'm thinking of a number between 1-10"
    INPUT guess%
    IF guess% > rand% THEN
        PRINT "Too high!"
        GOTO LoopBack
    ELSEIF guess% < rand% THEN
        PRINT "Too low!"
        GOTO Loopback
    ELSE
        guess% = rand%
        COLOR 15
        PRINT "You win!"
        COLOR 7                         ' Reset the console color otherwise it's going to look crappy
    END IF

END FUNCTION

Okay, as promised I will be posting code and thoughts as I teach myself PowerBASIC. After my last bit with the ever popular "Hello, World!" I decided to head to variables.

First off, variables are much like those in C. You declare them, then give them values. For example in C:

// quick program to show how variables work
#include<stdio.h>

int main(void);
{
    // Let's declare an integer variable
    int number;

    // Now let's assign it a value of 2
    number = 2;

    // Now let's print the value of the variable to the console to see the value we assigned it
    printf("The value of number is %d", number);
}

When compiled the above will display "2" on your console (whether it be Windows, DOS, Linux, etc.). In PowerBASIC things are just a tad different:

#COMPILE EXE
#DIM ALL

FUNCTION PBMAIN() AS LONG
    ' okay these are our integer variables
    DIM a AS INTEGER
    DIM b AS INTEGER

    ' this will be our string variable so it work's with MSGBOX (see above)
    DIM answer AS STRING
   
    ' now we tack values into those integer and string variables
    a% = 1
    b% = 2
    answer$ = STR$(a% + b%)

    ' we used the STR$ function to convert the integers to a string so MSGBOX will work
    MSGBOX "1 + 2 = " & answer$
END FUNCTION       

To declare a variable in PB you need to start with a DIM statement then follow with what type of variable you want it to be. DIM a AS INTEGER declares the variable "a" as an integer. Assigning values to variables is much like C as you can see from the code above.

Variable type specifiers in PB
% - integer
& - long integer
&& - quad integer

? - byte
?? - word
??? - double word

! - single-precision
# - double-precision
## - extended-precision

$ - string

As I get more comfortable with PB I'll discuss variable scope (local/global) in another post.

I made my first Win32 program using PowerBASIC.

#COMPILE EXE
#DIM ALL

FUNCTION PBMAIN() AS LONG
    MSGBOX "Hello, World!"
END FUNCTION

After you stop laughing I'll mention this is my first attempt at Win32. I'm much more at home with a terminal/console. It seems so much simpler to just printf() your feedback to the user rather than creating dialogs.

Anyway, I figure it's high time I did some Win32 programming, and PowerBASIC seemed like a great place to start. I was able to purchase a license using some of my budget up this year with the hopes that I could create a few small programs that would help me out around the building. I was initially going to work with Visual Basic but I have bloatphobia. I can't stand seeing EXE files that are 5MB compiled with VB, then the same program ported to PowerBASIC is less than 1MB and faster to boot.

Anyway, I will be posting laughable bits of PB code here as I slug my way through the Win32 API.

I've been using Q Software Solution's free (for personal use) lcc-win32 C compiler lately due to the updated C99 standard and the fact that it works with the Win32 API. After great initial impressions I was disapointed to see that compiled .EXE files had tremendous sizes compared to my older MS-DOS based compilers. For example this code snippet yielded an .EXE size of 49.5KB:

// This is a simple Hello World program

#include<stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("Hello World!");
}

For having just six lines of code and one function call that's an awefully large executable. I looked into the issue on Q Software's forum and found that they changed their libraries in order to maintain C99 compatibility. The fix is to add msvcrt.lib to the link process. This was easy to do by clicking Project > Configuration > Linker and adding "msvcrt.lib" under the "Additional files to be included in the link." I recompiled the above code after doing this and the file size dropped to 12.9KB. Much better!

For further optimization you can choose two options to lower the executable size even more. Project > Configuration > Compiler and tick "Optimize" under Code generation. Then go to the Linker tab and tick "Do not include the debug information" under Options. With these settings the above Hello World program had a compiled size of just 3.1KB!