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The Liberty BASIC Editor
When you start Liberty BASIC, you will see a window like this:
This is where code is written, and this is where you will spend most of your time when writing Liberty BASIC programs. Notice the various pull-down menus along the top of the window. These are for loading and saving files, editing, running/debugging, setting up configuration, and getting help.
Running an example program:
Let's begin our exploration of Liberty BASIC by running one of the sample programs we've provided. Pull down the File menu and select the Open item as shown. To open a program, you can also click the button on the toolbar that looks like an open file folder. Typical Liberty BASIC programs have a file extension of *.BAS. You can choose the default extension you prefer in the Setup Menu.
You will see a dialog box similar to the one displayed below. Here you will find a list of files that you can load. These are text files containing our example BASIC programs. Select the item named draw1.bas and click on OK.
Liberty BASIC will load the draw1.bas program you selected. The result will look like this window. This is BASIC code for a Windows drawing program. As you learn to program in Liberty BASIC you will be able to extend this program and the other included samples to do what you want. But right now let's see how it runs!
Running a Liberty BASIC program is easy. Select the Run menu and mouse click on the Run item, as illustrated below. You can also run a program by clicking the button on the toolbar that looks like a blue, running man, or by pressing the "Shift" key and leaving it down while pressing the "F5" key.
Now Liberty BASIC will take a few seconds to compile and run the drawing program (some computers will take longer than others). When it is finished compiling, a window belonging to the drawing program will appear:
Let's try drawing a little something with Liberty Draw!
Feel free to play with Liberty Draw, and, when you're done close its window.
Customizing the Liberty BASIC Editor
Make the Liberty BASIC editor work the way you want it to work. Select the Set Up menu to configure Liberty BASIC to your preferences.
The Preferences Dialog:
From the Set Up menu, you can also:
- set the font face and size that will appear in the editor
- set the printer font face and size that will be used to print code from the editor, and also for lprint commands.
- set up external programs to run from the Run menu. These can be executables, or Liberty BASIC TKNs.
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Liberty BASIC - http://www.libertybasic.com/