The following keywords behave differently in QBasic than in BASICA: BSAVE, BLOAD QBasic does not support the cassette device with BSAVE and BLOAD, and memory locations may be different. CALL ABSOLUTE Assembly language programs invoked from BASICA that have string arguments must be revised for QBasic because QBasic string descriptors are 4 bytes long. The 4 bytes are the low byte and high byte of the string length followed by the low byte and high byte of the string address. CHAIN QBasic does not allow you to specify a line number with CHAIN and does not support the ALL, MERGE, or DELETE options in BASICA. COMMON, DECLARE QBasic does not allow executable statements to appear before COMMON and DECLARE statements. DEFtype If BASICA encounters a variable without an explicit type (indicated by !, #, &, $, or %), it uses the default type set by the most recent DEFtype statement. For example, the type of the variable IFLAG changes from integer to single precision in the following BASICA code fragment: 10 DEFINT I 20 PRINT IFLAG 30 DEFSNG I 40 GOTO 20 In QBasic, a variable's type cannot be changed after it appears in a program. DIM All arrays in BASICA are dynamic because BASICA always allocates array storage while a program runs. In QBasic, DIM can declare either a static or dynamic array. DRAW, PLAY DRAW and PLAY statements in BASICA that use variables or other command strings within command strings must be modified for QBasic. Use the VARPTR$ function, which returns a string representation of the variable's address: BASICA Statement QBasic Equivalent ------------------ ------------------------------- DRAW "Xcmdstring$" DRAW "X" + VARPTR$ (cmdstring$) DRAW "TA = angle" DRAW "TA =" + VARPTR$(angle) EOF When you direct input from a file to a BASICA program, EOF(0) returns true at the end of the input file. In QBasic, EOF(0) returns true after the next record is read past the end of the input file. For example, the following program runs in BASICA, but generates an "Input past end of file" error message in QBasic: 5 WHILE NOT EOF(0) 10 LINE INPUT ; A$ 15 WEND FIELD When a random-access file is closed in BASICA with a CLOSE or RESET statement, field variables retain the last value assigned to them by a GET statement. In QBasic, all field variables are reset to null strings.