What the...?
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As soon as you removed the packaging from your HiSoft BASIC box, you 
switched on your Atari, rushed the main disk into the drive, installed 
the language and ran the example files to see what the new language 
could do with the AES. Go on, admit it! It's the same for all of us: 
we want to see what we spent all that money on. Once you've seen your 
first alert box appear on the screen, even though it may be a simple 
message it displays, you feel you've got your moneys' worth.

This tutorial is about a beginners guide of how to use HBASIC. Don't 
worry if you're new at programming in BASIC, I'll be showing you how 
to use the simple commands, with a combination of the 'more advanced' 
AES routines. By the end of the tutorial, you'll know about he basics' 
of the language, how to use menus, dialogs, window dialogs, text 
windows, picture windows, alert boxes, windows, the fileselector, how 
to make accessories, and I'll also be showing you 'the tricks of the 
trade' as well. These include 'shareware delays' and 'progress 
meters'. I might even include a tutorial to use SpeedoGDOS. If you've 
never even heard of some of these things before, don't worry. Every 
issue I will supply a picture or diagram of what I'm talking about in 
the tutorial, and I'll try to give you an example of where you would 
see something like it in another well known program. I assume in this 
tutorial that you know how to use the editor of HiSoft BASIC at least.

Ok, lets go...

A simple program
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Once you've loaded up HBASIC, type in this very simple listing:

<0001.GIF>

Compile the program using [control]X. This will also run the program. 
You will see after the program has executed that 'Hello!' has been 
printed - or written - to the window. This is one of the simplest 
commands possible. What ever is in the speech marks is printed to 
screen. Try some other texts just to make sure you understand the 
command. Once you're finished, try this...

<0002.GIF>

A slightly more complex program. Run the program in the same way as 
above. This time, you will notice a series of 'Hello!'s, a space, and 
then a number. These numbers are the contents of A. It's a bit like 
algebra really. The FOR tells HBASIC that our variable A should start 
at 1 and go to 10. The semi-colon (";") tells HBASIC to print the A 
next to the 'Hello!'. Change 'PRINT "Hello!";a' to 'PRINT "Hello! a"', 
and try that. You notice this time the A isn't printed, instead 'a' is 
printed. Do you see the difference between the text and the variable? 
The 'NEXT a' tells BASIC that this is where our FOR loop ends. This 
command really tells it to continue with the 'FOR' command until it 
has finished. Ok, lets try something more interesting...

<0003.GIF>

Couldn't resist it! It does play a vital part of this tutorial though;
it introduces us to the STEP command. Instead of going to one number 
through to the next, the STEP command tells BASIC to jump numbers. For 
example, our FOR a=2 to 8 STEP 2 will start at 2, and jump 2 to land 
on 4, then jump on to 6, and stop at 8. Do you notice that 'What do 
you think goes here?' only appears after the FOR loop?

How long is a piece of string?
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Using numbers is fine on it's own, but what about if you want text in 
your programs? Well, that's easy too. A string, which contains text 
has a name ending in "$". For instance, 'mytext$' can contain text, 
where 'mytext' without a American dollar sign can only contain 
numbers. Try this program:

<0004.GIF>

Another way of writing 'PRINT ac$;a' would be to write out 'PRINT 
"Atari Computing issue";a', however, in programs which use text 
heavly, the latter shouldn't be used. For instance:

<0005.GIF>

A number, a big gap and then a letter should appear on the screen. In 
fact, 26 letters displaying the whole alphabet to be exact. You may 
have noticed that there is a comma (",") instead of our normal 
semi-colon (";") in the PRINT statement. This, as you've seen, gives a 
bigger space in between the objects being printed. Another way of this 
command would be to use:

<0006.GIF>

Lets look up CHR$ in the manual. You'll find the command on page 16 of 
the 'Technical Reference'. Each of the commands you use in HBASIC will 
have the same instructions to its use as the page you see before you. 
Of course, the function will probablly be different. We can see that 
this function will produce a character numbered ASCII_code in its 
brackets. In the above example, this is our variable A. ASCII, as you 
may or may not know, stands for American Standered Code for 
Information Interchange. ASCII was invented by our friends the 
Americans to make sure that computer text would be displayed in the 
same way on every machine. For example, if I wrote "Hi People!" on my 
Falcon, and there was no such as ASCII, on a PC it might be displayed 
as "FjKtosdkks"! Using ASCII and CHR$, you can access all characters 
that the Atari can display. Here's another program:

<0007.GIF>

One final program:

<0008.GIF>

If you were to write a program to do this without string commands, it 
would turn out like:

<0009.GIF>

Just imagine if the text you wanted to print was a hundred letters 
long in the last example!

That's it for this issue. Next time we will be looking at making 
simple alert programs, and how to make your program take decisions. 
We'll also be starting our project, a simple ultility to print out 
documents. Until then, try experimenting with the programs I've given 
you. Why not try to figure out how the 'triangle' program works? 
Remember you can look up any commands you are unsure of...