Classy Front End, Update

Greetings and salutations! We begin the new year with discussing a bug in Part Four (NOV/DEC issue of TDM). That’s right, a bug, and the funny thing is nobody noticed it all this time, not even me. But this publication is blessed with some astute readers like Lou Dooley of Ocala, Florida who was kind enough to write.

It is only one byte, but in machine code, one byte can be the only loose nut you need for a real crash. This byte is located on page 17 of the last issue in Listing 1. Find line 130 (a DATA statement) of Listing One. At the end of the first line is the number 136. See it? Well, he’s our bug…it should read 137. Now all the latest copies of “BINGHAM’S BEST” don’t have a bug, and those owners of the early version were all sent cards before Christmas to make them aware of it. But for all of you who type in listings yourselves, you may want to make the change. If not, the ERROR C routine, should you ever use it, could put an extraneous character in memory. If you then rerun the program, this could give you a strange lock-up, a crash, or the like.

Lou also came up with a great little two byte alteration. What it does is solve the dilemma of having to program the USER print calls and the REMs containing all the characters to be printed in two different lines. It can now be all in one line like this:

2000 IF USER print THEN REM AT 2, 10;"ABC-123"

Here’s all you need to do: Find Classy Front End Part 3 in the Sept/Oct ’87 issue. On page 20 look for Listing 1. In line 20 (a DATA statement) the second line reads: ,35,119,42,85,92,1,5,…and so on. Change the 85 to 93 and the 5 to 2. That’s all there is to it! (Remember all lines must be typed in the new way as shown above once you have made this change. The program will not accept lines written the old way.) This little modification seems to work well. Thanks Lou!

Next issue is dedicated to GRAPHICS and so it seems an appropriate time to jump into the next level of CFE programming: WINDOWS. Until next time, keep working on new ideas for CLASSY. Please feel free to send me any of them or questions you might have. If you wish to use CLASSY but want to avoid all the typing, it is included on my “BINGHAM’S BEST” cassette (along with other machine code and BASIC programs from past articles in TDM). The cost is $9.95 ppd. My address is: Paul Bingham, PO Box 2034, Mesa, AZ 85214.