BlitzPlus Changes..

Hi.

I am a registered user of BB, B3d and BPLus.
I mainly do 2d work to be honest.
I purchased BPlus yesterday.
I currently have all three versions of Blitz on my system,
for testing purposes.

My old BB games from 2001 - I was glad to see compiled and run just fine on the latest BB and B3D versions.

The same code had big probs on BlitzPlus.

I had a few lines:

Print "To the console"
Print
Print "This text"

It stops with an error during compile at the empty print line, requiring Print "" instead.
Surely it would be more consistant with older versions of Blitz if the compiler accepted Print on its own - the docs still say the print <string argument> is optional after all..

Ok. you may say - use TEXT commands instead - drop the console use etc. but my point is that it should compile old code just as well as Blitz3D is happy to do....
No??

Secondly, in my program I am waiting for a key to be pressed - say "S" to start the game - and I am doing this form the text console. Again BlitzPlus hangs when you run this - I have heard something about that on these forums..

My point is - surely it should run the old code fine...

Also - why are these two observations above not put in print somewhere in the manual - in the migrating to BlitzPlus section for example..

Its very frustrating to spend a while trying to track down what has changed in the compiler functionality....

Comments anyone?

B+ ( as I understand it ) is a new language. Its a completely re-written leaner/meaner compiler that is heavily based on B2D but it has been re-designed to allow programs to be written that are windows applications rather than applications that can run under windows and also to run without being dependant on a specific version of DirectX being installed.
Mark has gone to a lot of effort to try and make it as backward compatible with the old language as possible and that seems to have given the impression its an upgrade to B2D.

If you look at the examples supplied and the tutorials you can see that the whole structure of a B+ program is very different indeed. Perhaps if the new language didnt bother trying so hard to make all the old Blitz commands available then it would not be so confusing.

I do agree that it would be nice to have a document distributed with B+ which explains any issues you may experiece when migrating code from B2D and what the solutions are.

Personnally all my old B2D applications I have I still continue using B2D to recompile. If I ever come across any application written in B2D that I wish to use in B+ then I would take a good long look at the core of the code and rewrite whatever parts of the app I need to make use of the messaging / canvases / menus / gadgets etc.

Of course when I find any old functions / libraries of code that would be useful in B+ I can salvage them and Im pleased that they require very little and usually no changes to compile them using B+.

Feel free to flame me if I am wrong.. I like a good grilling :)

Thanks. Your comments make sense and I tend to agree with you..

A doc would still be handy though for those migrating issues...

There is a doc - it's the appendix of the BlitzPlus User Guide. (Not obvious maybe, but it's there). However, it is incomplete, and I don't recall if this gotcha is in there. I'm in the process of updating that User Guide myself, so I'll try to remember to update it...

Yeah I read the migrating guide but as you say - it could do with a small update..

I am far from NOT happy with BlitzPlus by the way - its great - just a few things I noticed during my first few hours of using it....

I've had problems with reading keys in textmode programs. They just don't get read.