Silly Love Songs:

Inspired by Charlie's BAM version I started from scratch for QB64 version with added full colorization mode.
Use b key to toggle color modes or esc to quit, any other key shows another random tile tessellated screen:

This is a silly program that could almost be used as screensaver. It needs music LOL, so it's better.

I derrived the idea from a book on programming games in GW-BASIC by David L. Heiserman (had to look it up), but it's not the book being sold on Amazon that readily comes up in the searches. I think it was called "101 Games In BASIC" or alike. The programs weren't all games; some of them did silly things on the screen. My favorite from them was the "Hacker's Aid". I made my own version with fancy text-graphics and with beeping from "SOUND". It even emulated dial-tone telephone and ringing LOL.

Honorable mention was the "Surrogate Cusser" which could have gotten boring quickly. Fiddlesticks!

I don't remember very well but there might have been a version of that book for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, or for the Model III which was incapable of sound. Instead of sound it had a subroutine that "blinked" a short message on the screen. That was its favorite trick.

This program has the "robot" moving in a different way from the old program it was derrived from. It has a quirk not found in the old program.

Hi,

if code is running inside a SUB, can I somehow get the SUB name?
This would be great to have for debugging or logging.

I'm looking for a reliable way to determine if a drive letter is in use but I'm running into some difficulties.

Take the following small clip as an example:

A$ = "F:\"
If _DirExists(A$) Then
    Print A$; " Exists"
Else
    Print A$; "Does not exist"
End If

Normally, this works fine and indicates if the drive letter contained in A$ exists. But now consider these two exceptions:

1) Suppose I have a thumbdrive attached to the system that has been wiped clean. By wiped clean, I mean you open DISKPART, select the thumbdrive, and perform a "CLEAN" on that drive. In this instance, there will be no partitions on the drive, but in File Explorer, the drive still shows up with a drive letter. However, the clip above will indicate that this drive letter does NOT exist. As a result, if I try to assign that drive letter to another drive, it will fail because it is already in use.

2) The same thing happens if I connect a drive that has BitLocker encryption but has not yet been unlocked. The QB64PE code will indicate that the drive letter does not exist even though it is already in use.

Any suggestions on a better way to determine if a drive letter is in use?

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue...508#fedora

This but sucks so very hard.

It looks like IBM and Red Hat want as less people as possible programming, especially if the user is stuck using one operating system which belongs to Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise Linux family. They are not leaving behind the GNU Compiler Collection because they want to save disk space on the ISO!

They didn't dare touch Git (yet). :/

Kudos to Slackware, soon to celebrate its 30th anniversary for never, ever taking off many of the "devel" libraries and other tools needed to build PPA's and stuff like that. Because that was a requirement on Unix. Long live the slack!

I was going to post this on the QB64PE v3.7 release announcement thread but created a separate topic here because I would like other people to react to these news about one of the most popular distros around. React only to the review about Fedora 38 if you want. Correct me if this insinuation about "gcc" is not right LOL.

Hi, 

I have this snippet to get the number of processor cores.
Problem is that the SHELL command produces a unicode text file and LINE INPUT is not able to read the text correctly.
Manually converting tmp.txt to an ascii file solves the problem.
Question is why is the file created as unicode by default?
Can I influence this from within QB64?
OS is Win 11.
Btw.: I tried also OPEN ... FOR BINARY - doesn't change anything (e.g. LINE INPUT still can't read UNICODE as text):

QB64 Phoenix Edition v3.7.0!

https://github.com/QB64-Phoenix-Edition/...tag/v3.7.0

Enhancements

• #315, #319, #327 - Implemented a new "Code Export" feature reachable via the "File" menu. - @RhoSigma-QB64
  • Useful for authors of tutorials, documentations or Wiki pages, they can now easily export the currently edited code and insert it in their work. The code is highlighted according to the currently chosen color scheme in the IDE and the keywords are linked to its respective Wiki pages.
    
  • Export is possible as Hypertext (.html), Rich Text (.rtf) or Wiki encoded text (.txt).
    
• #188, #330, #335 - Added commands for rendering Unicode text - @a740g
  • _UPrintString
    acts like regular _PrintString but accepts Unicode strings.
    
  • _UFontHeight gives the global glyph height of a given font, which may be larger than the _FontHeight. _UPrintString uses this height.
    
  • _UPrintWidth acts like _PrintWidth and returns the width in pixels a Unicode string will take up when printed using _UPrintString.
    
  • _ULineSpacing will give the proper vertical spacing (font height + extra pixels) to vertically separate multiple lines of text.
    
• #188, #335, #330 - Improve and optimize Font internals - @a740g
  • Font loading should be significantly faster due to the addition of a lazy Glyph cache.
    
• #232, #330, #335 - Added a new _LoadFont() argument which allows loading a font from memory - @a740g
  
• #316, #317, #318, #320, #322, #325 - Many internal libraries were updated or replaced - @a740g
  • zlib was replaced with miniz
    
  • stb_image.h was updated to v2.28
    
  • miniaudio was updated to v0.11.13
    
  • tinysoundfont was updated to the latest version (2/18/23)
    
• #325 - Added support for using SoundFont3 (SF3) format files with $MinisoundFont - @a740g
  
• #329 - Added RAD v1 file support - @a740g
  
• #124, #321, #326 - Improved Declare Library header file resolution - @a740g, @mkilgore
  • If Declare Library is in an '$include'd file, then it can also find header files that are relative to the location of the '$include'd file rather than the original source file.
    

• #319 - Fixed the "Update All Pages" process in the IDE. - @RhoSigma-QB64
  • Creation/renaming/deletion of new/old Wiki pages shouldn't break the update process, but instead reflect the made changes in the local help too.
    
  • The problem was originally discussed here: https://staging.qb64phoenix.com/showthread.php?tid=1521
    
• #333, #334 - Fixed the Keyboard _Devices entry on Windows - @mkilgore
  • Alt+key combination will now be correctly reported.
    
  • Pressing left and right shift at the same time will now be correctly reported.
    
• #332 - Fixed potential segfault in PLAY() - @a740g
  • BEEP was also improved so that multiple BEEPs in a row will have a short pause separating them.
    

Going back through some of my coding I found I've used Else and If where I perhaps should have used ELSEIF. It seemed to work out ok but I'm not sure if there is difference in how these two work together.

For example

If ..... then
....
....
...Else
... if .. then
...
...
Else
......
......
End if

V's

If ... then
....
....
ElseIF .... then
.....
....
Else
....
End If

The logic flow would suggest there is no difference.

I know how much time and effort there has been in discussing sorting algorithms,
but I wanted to post this program that tests 6 different sorting subroutines and their timings.

Erik.

Attached Files

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