Sorry, I phrased my suggestion badly, and made it sound like I meant the opposite of what I intended.
I agree, the length check is a great time saver. I also suggest that its cost is negligible enough that it’s not worth duplicating most of the code just for the purpose of skipping it.

I wonder if skipping the length check will save enough time - compared to the lower case conversions and comparison - to be worth having an optimised routine for. I think a better optimisation would be to use a case-insensitive comparison routine, even if you have to implement it yourself. This save...

“If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens ?” I like this one. It makes you think, because there are some cases where 1024 chickens would be preferable. If you have a large yard covered with chicken feed that you needed to clean up, would you rather us...

I wonder if the info about allocate/new/delete etc. could go in its own section somehow. Most people reading the article won't be interested in how to store string descriptors in allocated memory, but nor do we want to remove that information. I can't remember off the top of my head, does the wiki s...

You might find the forum thread at https://freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=25527 useful. I tried to compile a list of every symbol use I could think of. I didn't provide doc links, but it at least gives you a clue of what to look for.

FB shouldn't allow z to be used in an expression until after the Dim has finished initialising it. The problem is that the 'z' variable is visible to the compiler as soon as it is parsed, but isn't in a valid state until it's initialised. I remember trying to look into this a while back, but I could...

To be honest I didn't do this because I'm sure it's better if you reproduce the problems with the steps I have taken. Cutting and paste the issues serve nothing. There are a few advantages in posting the error messages: - for those who don’t take the time to replicate your steps, the error message ...

Looking at the example in the readme, it doesn't look to me like there's anything there that won't translate to FB.. /* init gui state */ struct nk_context ctx; nk_init_fixed(&ctx, calloc(1, MAX_MEMORY), MAX_MEMORY, &font); enum {EASY, HARD}; static int op = EASY; static float value = 0.6f; ...

It may be worth just saying, a line with just a comment (or an entirely blank line) appearing after a continued line, is processed the same way as actual code would be: it's as if the preceding underscore (and anything on the line after it) is stripped away and the contents of the following line is ...

A reference is basically anything with an address attached to it, such that it can (in theory) be assigned a value. This might be - for example - a variable, array index, or dereferenced pointer. To acknowledge the distinction from an expression without an address (e.g. '2+1'), you might call it an ...

I think putting the words "numeric" and "reference" together can be confusing. The word "numeric" is presumably there to indicate that the value of a character is a number (rather than, say, a 1-character string). But this is unclear because it's in a different part of ...

I think that you will need to keep the state of arr(,) unmodified until you’ve finished checking for neighbours.
This probably means maintaining a separate copy of the array, or at least the last couple of columns of it (seeing that you are sweeping the array from the left to right).

Looks like you searched for the wrong header...
Try installing libgpm-dev.
There's a list of dependencies for Debian at DevBuildLinux. If you install all those, that should take care of any missing headers.

It's fairly easy to set up a grayscale palette in 8-bit mode, using the Palette i, r, g, b syntax.

Here's a rough translate of interp() to FB: function interp(sf as FILE ptr, script as ubyte ptr) as integer while true dim as integer code = setjmp(trap) select case code case 1 '' file syntax error if sf <> stdin then return 1 case 2 '' fault opc = pc case 3 '' "BREAK" if opc then pc = op...