Great. Problem solved: i had to install and use the US keyboard instead of US international. Thanks!

On the US-International keyboard, the apostrophe and quote key is a 'dead' key - that is, it doubles as the acute and umlaut diacritic marks, so that if you type (for example) " then a, you'll get ä. To get the apostrophe or quote, press the key, followed by space.

If QB64 doesn't honor the system settings for keyboard and/or code page, you may get anomalous results - but I never had a problem with older versions.

Thank you very much for the reply and suggestions.

when I click that link I get "404: Page Not Available"

I'd have to study up on that. I was hoping that possibly a line or two could be simply added to Prithak's original code snippet.

Link is fixed; I didn't see that the automatic parser included the semicolon (;) as part of the URL. Sorry about that. :)

Yeah, 7zip opens pretty much all of the common Windows and *ix archive formats, and many of the less-common ones. The page at 7-zip.org lists the formats it supports:

• Supported formats:
  
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
  • Unpacking only: AR, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DMG, EXT, FAT, GPT, HFS, IHEX, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, QCOW2, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, UEFI, VDI, VHD, VMDK, WIM, XAR and Z.

There's no +1 button on the forums!  I need a +1 button!

Well, you can start with REVERSE$ from Rosetta Code.


Then, add enough spaces on the left to push it out to the console width to right-justify it so that it will look right.

Steve, I understand how it actually works (your explanation); my concern is that this is "broken as designed" because the behavior is unpredictable unless you know the actual values being passed at any given call. I'm not asking for strong typing (a la Pascal) - but I should be able to determine what will happen on a call by inspection, without having to know what the actual value is at run time. If I have a sub


and DoSomething expects Ecks to be a numeric type - integer, single, or double - and it tries to modify Ecks mathematically, there's nothing stopping me from writing the bogus code


Which should blow up in my face because I can't do math on "A String".

Arguably, it's my responsibility as codemonger to do input validation before passing data to subroutines/functions - but there's a difference between doing the basic bookkeeping of variable and parameter types versus validating e.g., that the input has only valid characters, matches a (regex) pattern, is within a specified numeric range, etc.

I contend that a compiler that doesn't do the bookkeeping has to be considered 'broken as designed'. Especially if I want to write libraries for general use, where I have NO control over what's passed in. Or use those created by others, which more often than not are poorly documented if documented at all.

I fundamentally do not have a problem with a procedure/subroutine or function modifying its arguments, but I think that where that is permitted, there needs to be some indication in the declaration that a parameter may be modified - for example, what would happen if in the SUB ADD_UP I had called it as "ADD_UP 1,2,answer"?

This is the difference between 'call by value' and 'call by reference'. In Pascal, call by reference is indicated by prefixing the parameter name with VAR, e.g., Procedure AddUp(var Answer:Integer; first, second: integer;); ...

While there may be something to what the article says, I question whether the emphasis may be in the wrong place - in my experience, it's not that BASIC or COBOL is a crappy language (although they both do have 'features' that encourage poor practice); it's that most BASIC (or COBOL) instructors teach poorly. Even if you're using a low-end BASIC like Apple's Integer BASIC or AppleSoft BASIC, or Commodore's BASIC on the PET (rather than a mid-BASIC like GW-BASIC or BetterBASIC, or a high-end BASIC like QB/QB64, Visual BASIC, or CA-REALIZER), you can write well-structured, more-or-less modular code. However, you have to be taught to think about the problem in the structured way, rather than the sort of ad-hockery that people accuse BASIC (rather than BASIC instructors) of encouraging.

(I say that there may be something to what the article says, because I've experienced it - it doesn't matter what syntax I'm using, be it C, Pascal, BASIC, PowerShell, LISP, APL, or whatever; I have a tendency to "write my code in Pascal". This is a very pronounced tendency; when I took a 'survey of programming languages' course in college, one of the languages surveyed was APL. When I handed in the APL project, the instructor returned it with full marks, but also a written comment, "You're a Pascal programmer, aren't you?". He could tell from the way I wrote the APL, even though I used proper APL 'idioms' and shortcuts.)