puppybasic intro ch. 06 - more with text

green text is being edited and should not be considered  
relevant to the tutorial. for a while, it will make up  
the bulk of this section.
  
black text has been edited to be more accurate with  
regards to puppybasic.

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more with the text screen                                                
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                  an intro to puppybasic                                 
                                                                         
                  chapter 6: more with text                   
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
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more with text                                              
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with PRINT, COLOR, and CLS already covered, here are some more ways to   
work with the text-only screen:                                          
                                                                         
LOCATE y                                                                 
will tell puppybasic to start printing on row y of the screen.               
                                                                         
or                                                                       
                                                                         
LOCATE y, x                                                              
well tell puppybasic to print at row y, column x. x is usually 1 to 80.      
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
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though it flies in the face of cartesian graphs, descartes was a bit of  
a jerk after all, and it makes enough sense to address text as row,      
column. the LOCATE command lets you do this, but you may not be able to  
do anything on the bottom row (this tends to be the 25th one) unless     
your PRINT command uses a semicolon;                                     
                                                                         
LOCATE 25, 1                                                             
PRINT "print with a semicolon on the end to print on the bottom row.";   
                                                                         
________________________________________________________________________ 
_print with a semicolon on the end to print on the bottom row.__________ 
                                                                         
                                                                         
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also, making the cursor fly back and forth can be sort of annoying, so:  
                                                                         
LOCATE y, x, 0 ...makes it go away and (when you want it to show where   
someone is going to be typing, for instance)                             
                                                                         
LOCATE y, x, 1                                                           
makes it come back. 
                                                                         

                                                                         


                                                                         
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now that you are thinking in terms of coordinates,                       
                                                                         
CSRLIN                                                                   
represents the row the cursor is on, and                                 
                                                                         
POS(0)                                                                   
represents the column. if you print something to the screen, let         
a = CSRLIN and b = POS(0), LOCATE to some point on the screen (say the   
top lefthand corner,) PRINT something there and then LOCATE a, b, you    
will then pick up where you left off. this sort of thing can be useful   
for status bars.                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
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VIEW PRINT                                                               
                                                                         
is odd but i find it useful: where the text-only screen usually has 25   
rows, you can force smaller ranges. VIEW PRINT 10 to 17 keeps the text   
currently displayed on all 25 lines, but when you print within lines 10  
to 17 it will only scroll within (and change) lines 10 through 17.       
                                                                         
q = SCREEN (y, x)                                                        
will set the variable q to the ascii value of whatever character is at   
position y, x, so that you can not only print to the screen, but read    
from it as well.                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
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WIDTH columns, rows                                                      
                                                                         
can be useful, but what you can enter as acceptable values for columns   
and rows depends on what screen mode you're using. in text only mode,    
                                                                         
WIDTH , 50                                                               
gives you twice as much top-down room to work with (try 43 too), but     
                                                                         
WIDTH 40 (horizontal) doesn't work reliably. this is covered later with  
the SHELL command.                                                       
                         -= end of chapter 6 =-                          
                                                                         
                                                                         
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an intro to puppybasic                                       (chapter 6) 
this content is public domain.                          
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