PowerBASIC Tips and Tricks

PowerBASIC  stands head and shoulders above the competition — namely, Visual Basic and VB.NET — in terms of speed, functionality, program compactness, resource management, ease of use, and more.  Since you might already be aware of these things, I'll cut short the unsolicited testimonial.  I would say, however, that I was originally turned on to PowerBASIC  by that fact that it can talk to a DLL written in C — something that VB cannot easily do, but which I critically needed, and still do.  Also, PB's support for macros is to die for.

Because my personal interests have no need of graphics or fancy interfaces, the Console Compiler  fills the bill.  Although many of my methods involve manipulations of the console screen itself, some could be tailored for use with PB-Win or any other BASIC compiler.  In any case, this stuff makes my own life easier, and it might do something for you as well.  Some of it lies somewhere between the unorthodox and the outrageous; so it might be useful only to a 'stand-alone' programmer — not someone who must share code with others on a regular basis.

I also find it enervating to have to make sense of other programmers' online code, comments, variables and keywords outside an IDE-style color-coded environment.  Not wishing to subject you to similar tedium, I would present only the most pertinent snippets of code, and in an easily readable format.  I leave to you the mundane details of program setup.

I recommend that you access the menu items in top-down sequence, because any article might feature a method or protocol introduced on a prior page.