Recently a number of commercial programming tools have been released as freeware. They are ProWesS, DJToolKit, MasterBasic, and the TurboToolkit.
Of the four packages, ProWesS is the biggest and most surprising to be released as freeware. It is a major piece of work, fairly complicated, and gives a lot a capability to the user (and programmer).
Let me take a minute and give a quick description of ProWesS. I’ll start with something most of you would already know about, the Pointer Environment. The PE is composed of two parts, the Pointer Interface (ptr_gen) and the Window Manager (wman). The PI takes care of the mouse and the WM takes care of the screen displays. The look of the PE is based upon the Window Manager (wman). ProWesS is another Window Manager for QDOS. It is used to create a whole different look for applications and provides some features (such as scalable fonts) not found in the PE Window Manager.
Another way of looking at this is to view Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 as two different Window Managers. A program written for Win 3.11 will run under Win95, but it will have the look of a Win95 program. For users of Q40/Linux, they are finding out that Linux has quite a number of different Window Managers available.
Unlike most Window Managers, PE and ProWesS programs can be run at the same time and be displayed on the same screen.
For the programmer, what ProWesS gives is another way to create pointer driven programs. If programming for the PE is a little beyond a programmer, they might find programming for ProWesS a little easier. Plus, the various additional features that ProWesS has over the PE gives the programmer additional capabilities for the application.
The DJToolKit (DJTK) is a collection of SuperBasic extensions written by Norman Dunbar. I bought DJTK a few years back and have found it useful in my programming. It contains 44 new keywords, which are broken down into 4 main areas: File handling, Font handing, Screen handling, and Heap handling. The distribution comes with the complete documentation, giving enough information to get started. I’d recommend that all SuperBasic programmers give this toolkit a look. You might just find THE extension that makes your programming easier.
TurboToolKit (TTK) has been updated to fix a number of bugs and to have it work with newer versions of QDOS and SMSQ/E. Like the DJTK, TTK is a collection of extension for SuperBasic. I have never used Turbo or the TTK so I don’t know any specifics about the extensions. Some of the extensions are document in the text files that come with the distribution, but they look to cover those parts of TTK that have been updated. Like DJTK, now that TTK is freeware, it’s worth a look to see what it has. Maybe better documentation will be released with Turbo is released.
MasterBasic by Davide Santachiara (and released by Ergon Development) is a SuperBasic tool for assisting in the creation and debugging of SuperBasic programs. This program has recently been released as freeware and is available on the Ergon Development web page ………….
I must admit that I bought this program a few years ago, but have not really gotten around to trying it out. MasterBasic is a collection of routines and programs with a graphical front end. It is designed to work on a program in memory (ie. a LISTable program). It can do things like searching for a string in the program, quickly find and edit Procedures and Functions, quickly finding a variable, and so on. It also comes with some accessory utilities like a calculator, notepad, and job management tool.
I guess the reason I have never tried MasterBasic is that I prefer to write SuperBasic in an editor (like MicroEmacs, ED, etc) and then LOAD and test it. With an editor I can quickly jump around putting in bits of code as I think of them. I can easily put more verbose comments in the code. Add white space for easy reading. I don’t plan my code to be syntactically correct when I write it. My first draft is very similar to a rough pencil sketch. Once I’ve done the mental dump to the editor, I can then flesh out the code and make sure it’s good SuperBasic.