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Showing posts from January, 2023

Feelin’ my age (part 4): Sinclair SuperBASIC on the QL

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In the 3rd post in this series,  Remembering UCSD P-system Pascal , I babbled on about my experience with UCSD P-system Pascal  and mentioned the Sinclair QL   and its built in dialect of BASIC - SuperBASIC . I still have a soft spot for that BASIC. Sinclair QL with the infamous microdrive tape cartridges. Photo from the Internet Archive Before acquiring the QL the whole of my programming had been done in BASIC. I'd read about other languages but never used them. These BASICs were quite primitive or, in the case of the Level 1 BASIC  on my 4Kb TRS-80 Model 1, extremely primitive. SuperBASIC was so different. Later it occurred to me that it leaned more towards Pascal. It's certainly has much better support for structured programming than the standard basics. For example it had: Multi-line  IF - THEN - ELSE - END IF  statements. A generalised repeat loop construct: REPeat - NEXT - EXIT - END REPeat. This can be exited anywhere within the loop. An IF - THEN - EXIT statement test

System Information Unit v5.19.0 released

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Happy new year folks. Being new year's day here in the UK, its customary for pretty much everything to be closed down. But here I am releasing the latest update of the System Information Unit from my DDabLib Code Library! Poor me ;-). What's new this time? Well, as usual it's all in the TPJOSInfo static class. As is now the norm the OS detection code has had its monthly revision to catch up with Windows 10 & 11 releases over the last month. This time there have been a few other tweaks too. Here's a list of the main changes: Update detection of Windows 10 21H1, 21H2 & 22H2 and Windows 11 21H2 & 22H2 with releases and Insider preview builds released in December 2022. Preview builds for all Windows 10 releases from version 1507 onward are now detected - before only those for Version 21H1 and later were reported. Detection of expired Dev and Fast Ring builds has been removed because there doesn't seem much point detecting expired OS releases! Accuracy of det