One of the advantages of Turbo Basic is its speed.
You can achieve great demos which would not be at all effective in
Atari Basic. This one from Gordon Cameron uses colour cycling to
achieve a fine animated effect and is a good example of how the
structure of Turbo Basic can be very different from ordinary Atari
Basic.
Take a look at how procedures are defined for the
three main parts of the program and the use of unique Turbo commands
such as DO, LOOP and REPEAT within the PROCedures. Another feature
is the use of labels in certain lines. Check line 1550 which draws a
border around the screen, for a good example of how a program can be
more easily understood. What could be easier when drawing a border
than saying go along, down, back and up? One thing that Gordon did
not do was to renumber the program. One of the reasons for having
labels and being able to GOTO a label is that a program can be
renumbered without having to worry about whether variables have been
used for line numbers.
YOU CAN DO THIS!
So there's another example of Turbo programming.
Can you do better? We'll pay you £20 for a good example of Turbo
programming. It must use the features unique to Turbo and be well
structured and it must fit on one page. Please also include a brief
explanation of the program. Anything will do, but try and make it
different!
WHAT IS TURBO BASIC?
Turbo Basic is a new Basic language for the Atari originally
published in the German magazine Happy Computing who retain the
copyright but have released the program to the public domain. It
adds over 60 new commands to Atari Basic, runs three to five
times as fast, is totally compatible with Atari Basic and comes
with a compiler to compile any Atari Basic or Turbo Basic
program to run at machine language speed. You should be able to
get a copy from any source of Public Domain software such as
your local user group or the PAGE 6 Accessory Shop.
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