FreeBASIC 0.20.0 manual released Aug 11/2008

Post by **coderJeff** » Dec 12, 2007 16:59

Post by **coderJeff** » Dec 12, 2007 17:09

These updates used to be posted at http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5699 but after more than a year on that thread, I thought it would be good to start a new one. You can watch this topic for updates (even if you don't post anything) by clicking on the "Watch this topic for replies" link at the bottom of the page.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the wiki is 100% up-to-date, but with the exception of CONST qualifiers, I think most everything in the change log between 0.18.2 and 0.18.3 (which is due for release soon) has been updated. If you do need some help with CONST qualifiers, check out notthecheatr's tutorial at http://www.freebasic.net/wiki/wikka.php ... Qualifiers

Users have been continuing to add notes, comments, improve the wiki content (Thank you!), so for the first time in a long time (maybe ever) I think the wiki has achieved a level of maintainability that has never been there before. It does not seem to be such a monumental task to add new information, user suggestions, etc, as once before. And remember, active members on this forum can register on http://www.freebasic.net/wiki using the same username and password as the fourm. You too can help improve FreeBASIC. :)

Last month the wiki under went a mass spell check (using american english dialect), so hopefully that will help programmers using (human) language translation tools to view the on-line wiki.

If you know some QB but are new to FreeBASIC, or are just updating from an old version of FreeBASIC, here are a couple of comparison tables that may help for showing the differences between QBasic, QB45, FreeBASIC and its dialects. I hope to one day put that in the wiki, but for now it is easiest for me to maintain and post as plain HTML tables. Please be patient on the first link, it's a big table.

http://www.execulink.com/~coder/fb/docs ... words.html
http://www.execulink.com/~coder/fb/docs ... ature.html

If you have need of a console based help viewer, check out fbhelp on my unoffical FreeBASIC docs page located at: http://www.execulink.com/~coder/freebasic/docs.html

DrV · Post by **DrV** » Dec 12, 2007 23:18

Those tables are very cool - nice work!

cha0s · Post by **cha0s** » Dec 12, 2007 23:50

Looking good as always. *high-five*

notthecheatr · Post by **notthecheatr** » Dec 13, 2007 5:07

Excellent, and I'm always happy to have my tutorial mentioned :D

gvandeno · Post by **gvandeno** » Dec 22, 2007 20:52

Is it correct that the boolean type is jet not described in the manual or do I mis something?

Friendly greetings,
gvandeno

DrV · Post by **DrV** » Dec 23, 2007 1:19

There is no boolean type in FB currently. The logic operators like And, Or, etc. accept and return integers.

Sisophon2001 · Post by **Sisophon2001** » Dec 23, 2007 11:45

DrV wrote:There is no boolean type in FB currently. The logic operators like And, Or, etc. accept and return integers.

Hi DrV,

This sounds strange (or perhaps misleading) to me, because I think there is no logical And, Or, etc in FB.

I really wish there were, I get confused and make bugs all the time trying to write code that needs logical operators (particularly when I need shortcutting) using bitwise comparisons.

Garvan

Post by **coderJeff** » Dec 23, 2007 13:21

There is no boolean type. It will be needed, otherwise many C++ headers can't be ported due to the name mangling.

Not/And/Or, etc are all bitwise. On the compiler TODO list are the short-circuiting operators AndAlso, OrElse.

Someday .. :)

Sisophon2001 · Post by **Sisophon2001** » Dec 23, 2007 13:52

Opps. Shortcutting was meant to be short-circuiting. Anyway I think I got my idea across.

Garvan

Post by **coderJeff** » Apr 15, 2008 17:56

FreeBASIC 0.18.4 manual in CHM format released Apr 15/2008

Download here:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fbc/FB ... p?download

The to eveyone that helped improve the wiki, especially Elsarion and DOS386. They both have a remarkable (possibly unnatural) attention to detail. :)

This is the first release of the docs to use the compiler version as part of the file name. Please understand that this snapshot of the documentation is not an *exact* match for the 0.18.4 compiler. But imo, finding docs later based on version number is going to be much easier than going by dates. And until someday when it is actually worth the time and effort to maintain separate branches of the manual, this is what we've got.

Sisophon2001 · Post by **Sisophon2001** » Apr 16, 2008 3:12

When I download from mirrors, the download stalls and I get nothing, when I try the direct link, I get 404 Not Found - The requested URL /sourceforge/fbc/FB-manual-chm-0.18.14.zip was not found on this server.

Is the file name correct, or it just bad connection time?

Garvan

Post by **coderJeff** » Apr 16, 2008 3:37

Yeah sorry, I posted the wrong filename. Should have been ...0.18.4 and not ...0.18.14.

It should be working now but it does seem to take quite a while for that download page to respond. Maybe that's so I'll watch the vstudio commercial and reconsider downloading any open source progs. :P

Post by **coderJeff** » Apr 29, 2008 13:19

FreeBASIC 0.18.5 manual in CHM format released Apr 28/2008

Download here:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fbc/FB ... p?download

Again thanks to everyone helping to make improvements to the wiki; especially Antoni, counting_pine, and DOS386.

Updated/Added:
- FAQ's.
- Compiling from SVN.
- Info about "native" and "standalone" Linux versions.
- $ and ! operator pages.

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If anyone has ideas how to organize the "Documentation" section on the sourceforge.net download page, I would be very interested to hear about it. ("Old Releases" section too). I could add the other formats besides CHM to sourceforge.net, but it's not really setup for it at the moment.

For previous releses of the manual, this page has been added to the wiki (Pages beginning with "FBWiki" are not included in the manual):
http://www.freebasic.net/wiki/wikka.php ... iDownloads

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The wiki exists only due to the effort of many FreeBASIC community members. If you notice an error or omission no matter how insignificant you may think it is, please consider helping our project by taking the time to make that correction. You too can help improve FreeBASIC. Thanks :)

Post by **coderJeff** » Apr 29, 2008 13:20

coderJeff wrote:If anyone has ideas how to organize the "Documentation" section on the sourceforge.net download page ..

See:
http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11339

FreeBASIC 0.20.0 manual released Aug 11/2008

FreeBASIC 0.20.0 manual released Aug 11/2008

Boolean.