[tbas] tbas basic interpreter

In my ample (NOT!) spare time, I'm helping out with a programming language project called tbas. I saw it advertised on comp.lang.basic.misc in September 2017 (yep, usenet is still going strong.)

The author is one Antonio Maschio from Italy.

You can get source, documentation and a CygWin binary from the main site. There are some examples on RosettaCode.

To give you an idea of the flavour of the language, the following is a simple CAESAR cipher implementation.

    LET MSG$ = ""
    LET OFFS = 0
    LINE INPUT "Message"; MSG$
    INPUT "Offset"; OFFS
    DIM TARG(LEN(MSG$))
    CHANGE MSG$ TO TARG
    FOR I = 1 TO UDIM(TARG)
        TARG(I) = TARG(I) + OFFS
    NEXT
    CHANGE TARG TO MSG$
    PRINT MSG$

An example of running the above

    >tbas CAESAR.BAS

    Message ? My dog's got fleas

    Offset ? 1

    Nz!eph(t!hpu!gmfbt

© Copyright Bruce M. Axtens, 2018

[VB6] Installation in Windows 10

I'm running Windows 10 Home, 64bit. We have legacy code that needs to be modified and recompiled. Folk who find such discussions unpalatable should read no further.

I found help for this process in two places:Forty Pound Head's Install VB6 on Windows 8 and CodeProject's How to install Visual Studio 6 on Windows 7 professional 64bit

(There's another blurb at SoftwareOK that I'm hanging on to just in case I meet any unforseen gotchas.)

In my case, the creation of the zero length file, MSJAVA.DLL, had to be done in C:\Windows\System32 rather than C:\Windows. I had put it in the latter and ended up with, for a while, the looping install scenario described by fortypoundhead.

The recommendation

Ensure Data access components is deselected. If it's not deselected, setup will hang!

— fortypoundhead

was interesting because the Enterprise installer asserted that the data access tools are required. However, I went with the recommendation as the thought of a hanging setup didn't appeal.

I turned off SourceSafe, FoxPro and InterDev as well. I opted to have environment vars stored in VCVARS32.BAT rather than have them registered: I feared mayhem might occur given the pre-existing Visual Studio Community 2013 and Community 2015 installs.

The install was very speedy.

The installer insisted on a reboot at the end. But before I said yes to that, I set the relevant Compatibility Settings for VB6.EXE as per fortypoundhead, started VB6.EXE, wrote a quick button on a form app, compiled it to EXE and then ran it from outside VB6. No problems at all!

Now I will have to run the various updaters and install some helper apps. But so far it looks like we could get another 17 years out of VB6.

© Copyright Bruce M. Axtens, 2015