This series of tutorials is a beginners guide to using HiSoft BASIC. By 
the end of the series you should be able to use menus, dialogs, window 
dialogs, text windows, picture windows, alert boxes, windows, the file 
selector and understand how to make accessories. I'll also be explaining 
the tricks of the trade including how to add 'Shareware delays' and 
'progress meters' to your programs. Later on, depending on the feedback, I 
may cover other topics.

Don't worry if you don't understand everything I'm saying as I will 
include plenty of pictures, diagrams and examples as we go along. I'm 
going to assume you have managed to get to grips with the HiSoft BASIC 
editor so if you haven't it's time to dig the manual out and experiment 
with it before reading on.

Lets go, Mr. Driver...
We start our tutorial off by a very simple program. Once you've loaded up 
HBASIC, type in this listing:

*** 0001.GIF here ***

You can run the program by using [Control]+X. Notice after the program has 
executed 'Hello!' has been printed - or written - to the HiSoft BASIC 
window. This is one of the simplest commands available. Whatever is inside 
the speech marks is printed to screen. Try some other texts until you've 
got the hang of it and once you're finished, try this...

*** 0002.GIF here ***

This is a slightly more complex program. Run the program as for the 
previous example. This time, notice a series of 'Hello!'s, a space, and 
then a number is printed. These numbers are the contents of the variable 
A. I hope you're good with maths, since it's really like algebra. The FOR 
tells HBASIC our variable A should start at 1 and go to 10. The semi-colon 
(";") tells HBASIC to print the A variable next to 'Hello!'. Change 'PRINT 
"Hello!";a' to 'PRINT "Hello! a"', and try that. Notice this time 'a', 
instead of the variable 'A', is printed. Notice the difference between the 
text and the variable? The 'NEXT a' tells BASIC this is where the FOR loop 
ends. This command tells it to continue with the 'FOR' command until it 
has finished. Time to try something a little more interesting...

*** 0003.GIF here ***

I couldn't resist it - but it does serve to introduce the STEP command. 
The STEP command tells HBASIC to jump numbers. For example, FOR a=2 to 8 
STEP 2 starts at 2, then jumps 2 to 4, then jumps another 2 to 6, and 
finally jumps another 2 and stops at 8. Do you notice 'What do you think 
goes here?' only appears after the FOR loop?

How long is a piece of string?
Adding text to your programs is easy to do. A text string always has a 
name ending in "$". For example 'mytext$' can contain any text string, 
whereas 'mytext' without the dollar sign can only contain numbers. Try 
this program:

*** 0004.GIF here ***

An alternative to 'PRINT ac$;a' would be to write out 'PRINT "Atari 
Computing issue";a', however as programs become longer it makes sense to 
store text which may be needed more than once in strings. Try this program 
next:

*** 0005.GIF here ***

A number, a gap then a letter should appear on the screen - all 26 letters 
of the alphabet to be exact. Notice there is a comma (",") instead of the 
semi-colon (";") in the PRINT statement. This is responsible for the gap 
between the objects being printed. You can of course replace the comma 
with the semi-colon to experiment.

Every command in HBASIC is detailed in the 'Technical Reference' section 
of the manual. CHR$ is detailed on page 16 which explains this function 
produces a character numbered ASCII code in its brackets. In the above 
example, this is our variable A.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and 
enables text created on one platform to be read on any other. Using ASCII 
and CHR$ any available characters can be displayed. This example displays 
the copyright symbol:

*** 0007.GIF here ***

Here's another way string commands can be used efficiently:

*** 0008.GIF here ***

A program generating the same result, without using string commands, could 
look like:

*** 0009.GIF here ***

Either method is fine for short strings but imagine how tedious the second 
method would become if the text to be output is increased to several 
hundred letters long...

Well, that's it for this issue. Next time we will look at creating our 
resource file in WERCS, and make a start on our tutorial project to 
produce a printer utility, named PDO. In the meantime why not try 
experimenting with the programs presented here and figure out how the 
'Triangle' program works?... You could even look at examples of printing 
utilities to give you a grasp of what I'm on about...

*** boxout ***
*** On Reader disk logo here ***
You can find a copy of HiSoft BASIC on this issue's Readers Disk along 
with an offer to buy the manual or upgrade to v2 at special prices direct 
from HiSoft.
Please do feedback your comments to Paul Jones via the Atari Computing 
office or direct to him at:
** BC on **
paulat.jones@zetnet.co.uk
** BC off **
*** end boxout ***