A job for over the holiday is to adapt an old program of mine so that it can accept a data file.  Nothing fancy, just numbers, one per line.

Rather than hard-code the file name into the program (which is what I tended to do, back in the day), I'm looking to specify it at run-time, in a user dialogue.

Does anyone have a code fragment that they'd share, showing how to do this?  Or is it as simple as inputting a string, and then entering that string in an OPEN# statement?

Malcolm

I don't think the Bubble sort is good for any case except for ease of understanding of how it works.

Agreed.  But gosh, it's easy to use in real-world low-number scenarios.

Malcolm

I think you're asking for a link for QuickBasic 4.5?  You'll also need vDosPlus to run it under.

My recommendation would be prove to yourself it works, and then port it to QB64 using the advice in this thread.  Much simpler than using DOS-era code under a DOS emulator!

I bought my copy of QuickBasic 4.5 back in 1989, but you'll probably find it on an abandonware site -- I'd try Vetusware first.

You can get vDosPlus here: http://vdosplus.org/

That said, I'd click through to the link to Ed Mendelson's download page, and download it from there.

Malcolm

Thanks again, folks.  Food for thought.

The vast majority of my numeric inputs get passed to a long-established subroutine that works like a charm, although I've recently had to tweak it to accept zero values as genuine.

Pure alphameric input in my programs is unusual, and in the original 1980s code, things worked.  (For reasons made clear here.)

There have been some useful suggestion in this thread, and with a couple of further programs on the stocks, I will be trying them out.  Call it the Covid-19 dividend: after many years of almost zero programming, there's something of a personal coding flurry underway at present!

Malcolm

I'm attempting to straighten out some 1980s code so as to eliminate a few GOTOs and make the whole thing a bit more linear.

The line below is supposed to check that an INPUTted string (text$) doesn't contain either an uppercase or lowercase 'Y' or 'N'.

IF (text$ <> "y" AND text$ <> "Y") AND (text$ <> "n" AND text$ <> "N") THEN linenumber = 20

Except that it doesn't: it fails heroically.

What have I done wrong?!  TIA.

Malcolm

 

Hi.

Where's the original post on this?  Happy to download the code and do some testing.

Malcolm

This may be a place to begin. In this section of my tutorial I outline file input/output and drive navigation.

http://qb64sourcecode.com/task13.html

Thanks, Terry.  That was very useful.  I didn't know about some of those new QB64 commands.

Malcolm