Release 15.08.5

[Rob Hagemans]

This is a bug fix release, with the following improvements:

• fix regressions causing Out of String Space and Out of Memory errors
• disable UTF-8 config files due to issues on Windows
• fix Out of Memory on repeated call to FN
• allow dereferencing array elements with VARPTR$ in DRAW and PLAY
• fix representation of octal literals interrupted by whitespace
• fix wrapping of lines with WIDTH 255
• fix Windows paths in --cas1 option
• correct behaviour of RUN "file",R
• fix crash on PRINT 0^(-1!)
• fix incorrect leading zeroes in PRINT USING
• documentation improvements
• include data/BASCODER.BAS, a translation program for Basicode

Thanks to Ronald, Wengier and Jan for bug reports.

[Ronald Herrera]

Excellent Release, nice job! :-)
Ron.

[Rob Hagemans]

Thanks Ron!

As usual, let me know if you do run into any bugs.
Rob

[Wengier]

This release does indeed work great in general from my testings. One problem I can find is that it does not always load tokenised or protected .BAS files well, especially when the program is large. I have uploaded the MARKMAN program saved in tokenised and protected formats, both of which are not loaded correctly with PC-BASIC.

Wengier

[Rob Hagemans]

Thanks Wengier, I'll have a look and see what's up. Always a joy to try out old programs anyway :)

Just to confirm, did these load correctly on a previous version of PC-BASIC?

Rob

[Wengier]

Rob: I have found that recent versions such as PC-BASIC 15.08.4 did not load them correctly either. However, I can confirm that some earlier versions such as PC-BASIC 14.10.1 did load both of them correctly.

Wengier

[Rob Hagemans]

Hi Wengier, thanks for the info!

I'm checking this currently - I'm seeing the problem (on a Windows XP VM; I've only tried MARKMANT.BAS so far) but it only happens if I load the file from the command line with -l or convert with with --convert. If I load from PC-BASIC with the LOAD command the problem does not happen and the file loads and runs correctly. Is that also your experience?

Thanks
Rob

[Rob Hagemans]

I've also found the problem - from the command line, the file is opened in text mode rather than binary, which on Windows means chr$(13) (CR) gets converted into chr$(13)+chr$(10) (CRLF), which proceeds to mess up the line number tokens. Also explains why I'm not seeing this on Linux - Unix text mode doesn't look for CRLF. It's a simple fix, will include in .6 release. Meanwhile, if you want to run this from the Windows command line, you could try something like
pcbasic.com -e='RUN "MARKMANT"' instead of
pcbasic.com MARKMANT.BAS.

[Wengier]

Right, using the syntax "pcbasic.com -e='RUN "MARKMANT"'" will load the program fine. Thanks for the fix too.

Wengier

[Wengier]

Also, I would suggest some clearnup of the main PC-BASIC installation directory. There are currently a lot of files with extensions .pyd or .dll in this directory, which makes it more difficult to work with BAS programs that are mixed with such files in this startup directory, especially when working from command-line. I would recommend to move all or most of these files to some subdirectories instead. Thanks!

Wengier

[Rob Hagemans]

I'm afraid the layout of the installation directory is not something I can do much about - this is how it is set up by PyInstaller, the packaging program I use. I would recommend not using the installation directory as the working directory but setting it in your PATH environment variable or simply calling PC-BASIC with the full installation path from the command line, while using a directory under your home directory as a working directory. If you start PC-BASIC from such a directory it will use it as its startup/working directory under the Z: device.

Rob

[Wengier]

Sure, I can do this instead. Thanks for the hint!

Wengier