What has that to do with GFA Basic? Be patient - I'll get to that, but first of all let me rant a bit!
Most of us have at least one program that requires an ".INF" file (a short text file which has INFormation that the program uses). Perhaps it's one of those RAMdisks that needs to know what size to make itself? Or maybe you use STARTGEM to autorun your GEM files; it requires a STARTGEM.INF file in order to know which program you wish it to load automatically. In any case, ".INF" files are usually nothing more than a line or two of ASCII text - no problem for most any word-processor, right? Right. The only problem is, who wants to wait for a mighty word-processor to load when all we want to do is write a few measly bytes of straight ASCII text to the disk?
Remember the good 'ole 8-bit computers? From DOS 2.5 you could easily accomplish the task of writing a small file to the disk by choosing [C]opy, and telling DOS you were copying from "E:" (the screen editor) to "D:FILENAME.EXT". After you typed in your text, you just pressed CONTROL-3 to alert DOS you were finished, and "bleep*bleep*bleep" the file was written to disk. Oh well, enough reminiscing - let's write a short file in GFA Basic that will do the same thing, and load in a snap.
WHY DIRTY WORD?
The accompanying listing is named 'Dirty Word' simply because it is a quick 'n dirty word-processor! Actually, it doesn't really qualify as a word-processor at all, since it has no advanced editing features. You don't have word-wrap (we covered that in a previous column), or search and replace, or even the ability to load files. What does it have? Well, you may type in some text, save it to disk, and, er, I guess that about covers it! I should mention that most of your editing keys are valid, thus you may use BACKSPACE and DELETE for normal corrections, and the right and left arrow keys to reach any part of your text. The beginning and end of text can reached by using the up and down arrow keys respectively.
SO WHY USE IT?
If you want to write little ".INF" files to disk, and hate waiting for those big word-processors to load, this may be your ticket. If you have the GFA Basic Compiler, you can compile this little program, and it will load in just a few seconds from the GEM desktop.
The following listing is short and easy to follow. I've commented it so that just about anybody can understand what's going on. Hope you get some use from this "quick 'n dirty" program named Dirty Word!
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding this column, write to me:
Rick Taylor, Editor
Atari Anonymous Memo Pad
P.O. Box 1433
Upland, CA. 91786
I look forward to hearing from you. See you next time...
