JULY 09, 2011 - BACK TO BASIC

I admit, the Lakemaids somewhat hampered my productivity last night. However, I made up for it today by spending a good couple hours reading through some of my BASIC books.

The first one I grabbed was BASIC/apple IIe: A PROGRAMMING GUIDE by Allen B. Tucker, Jr (1983). It proved to be a good selection as it was easy to read and contained pretty much everything I will need to accomplish my challenge.

Having had a bit of BASIC programming experience, I felt confident that with a little brushing up I would easily write the bulk of the code. However, the two things of which I was fairly unsure were:

• Storing records to disk and retrieving them later.
• Printing out the recipe.

However after today's reading I have learned that I can output numbered records to disk with PRINT CHR$(4); "WRITE filename, R"; r, and input them again in a similar manner. After that, it is just a matter of figuring out how to append new records to the end of the file.

I also read about outputting to the printer, which I already knew about (and used last summer). It is pretty simple, I'll just need a subroutine that will activate the printer as the output device, then display the recipe with proper tabulation. Seems pretty straight-forward.

Next I will proceed with one of the most despised things from my long-ago programming classes: flowcharts. I probably despised them back then because the programs were simple enough to conceptualize at once. However, with my various menus and sub-menus I have planned, as well as BASIC's required numbered lines, I will need to plan ahead to keep from re-doing my work.

That's all for today's update. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have some lines written.

~ Togart