[Coco] Coco BASIC files

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 19 December 2003 00:21, arikboke at yahoo.com wrote:
>Folks,
>
>Some please explain to me why BASIC comes in 'BASIC binary" and
> 'BASIC ascii'. Are not BASIC sources supposed to be .TXT files? 
> Also, when placed onto virtual diskettes via IMGTOOL in MESS, often
> times I am unable to access said files (neither ASCII nor binary). 
> I keep getting "FM? ERROR ..." or some variants.  Have they become
> corrupt?
>
>Sincerely,
>David

Maybe, but maybe not.  In coco basic, if you wanted to save it as text 
IIRC you had to append the ",A" to the filename.  Otherwise its saved 
in its already tokenized form where the basic keywords have been 
replaced with a character in the chr$(128) and up category, each of 
those 127 possible values indicating the correct keyword.

Irts been since forever, but it seems to me you had to load those ,A 
files with a ,A in the load command, but don't hold my hand anywhere 
near the good book on that.

Somebody more versed in coco basic can probably define this much 
better than I.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III at 500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP at 1400mhz  512M
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.