Re: Applesoft Basic IDE

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Dave Althoff Jr replied:

>Michael J. Mahon (mjmahon@aol.com) wrote:
>: Dave Althoff Jr wrote:
>
>: >Personally, I swore by GPLE and swore at Program Writer.
>
>: I'm curious about what caused you trouble with Program Writer.  It's easy
>: to enter with &&, and it sets 80-column mode.  I've never used it on
>: anything earlier than a //e, and I seldom, if ever, use embedded inverse
>: or control characters (though I think it can handle them).
>
>I never used those, either...I thought embedding control characters was a
>bit sloppy and/or lazy.  All those MicroSPARC programs that had that line...
>
>nn D$ = "" : REM THERE IS A CONTROL-D IN THERE
>
>seemed like it was counter-productive...why not just use...
>
>nn D$ = CHR$(4)

I agree compleely.

>Anyway, I never liked Program Writer because it was based on a completely
>different method of writing code than I learned to use in Applesoft.  For
>me, the real beauty of an interpreted BASIC is that you can instantly
>pound out code, test it, pound out more, test things directly from the
>command prompt, stick them into the program, and move on to something
>else.  Since Applesoft is program-line based, I never had much use for a
>screen-based editor, and more often than not, it just got in the way.  
>
>Program Writer is good if you're a programmer who sits down, writes a
>whole program, tests it, then debugs it.  If you can stand to work in
>Pascal, then Program Writer is probably fine.  But my programming style is
>better suited to GPLE.

I've never seriously used GPLE, having only tried it a few times many
years ago on my ][+.

But I'm still not sure I understand your issue with Program Writer's
work flow.  You edit a program, hit OA-Q and RUN, then to edit
you type &&.  Just the ease of a scrollable listing is enough for
me, even without editing!  ;-)

-michael

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