Author: Roberto Waldteufel
Date: 02:22:22 09/12/98
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On September 12, 1998 at 03:44:47, Jim Phillips wrote: >Roberto: >Greetings from a fellow BASIC/PowerBASIC programmer! I am writing my >first chess program in QBASIC so it will be accesible to everyone with >the QBASIC interpreter (in other words, millions of PC owners). But I >also have the PowerBASIC compiler (version 3.2 for now). I do most of >my programming with that, and to anyone "out there" who likes the BASIC >syntax but wants to move up to compiled programs: I can personally >recommend PowerBASIC. >Oh, by the way, congratulations on your respectable first-time-out >showing with Rabbit at FSV Summer98. :-) >Jim Phillips Hi Jim, Thanks for your kind words. I was very encouraged by Rabbit's performance, and I look forward to "Tournament B" on P200 machines and featuring some new entrants as well. I also used PB3.2 to write Rabbit, but I subsequently bought PBCC1.0 as soon as it was released and ported Rabbit to this new Powerbasic Console Compiler. I can highly recommend PBCC1.0 and its sister compiler, PBDLL5.0. Both these are 32-bit compilers, whereas PB3.2 is only a 16-bit compiler. The overall effect is a speedup somewhere between fourfold and fivefold - very usefull if you are writing speed-critical code like a tree-searching algorithm. It also means that all your inline assembly code is now 32-bit, and you get the full set of Intel opcodes rather than just a subset of them as in PB3.2. When I wrote in PB3.2 I used to use lots of ASM db statements for opcodes I needed but did not have, eg the bit scan instructions bsf and bsr. In PBCC and PBDLL you just code these opcodes like any others and the compiler has no problem with it at all. The only downside is that you are limited to the 32-bit Windows operating systems (Win95, Win98 or Win NT). Interestingly, PowerBasic Inc have announced their intention to develop versions for other OS's such as Unix and Linux in the future. If you dislike Windows (and who could blame you?), you might prefer to wait for this to happen before trying PBCC. I would certainly recommend that you give their demo a try. You can download it from the PowerBasic website, or telephone them and ask them to send you the demo diskette. Best wishes, Roberto
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