The context menu

The context menu

The context menu appears when you right-click the program listing in the editor.

When using the editor, it can be useful to quickly gain help or to tokenise a command in a string, or perform other operations on that command or variable. BasinC allows you to click your right mouse button within the Editor which will bring up the Context menu. Depending upon what you were pointing at when you clicked, the menu will differ. Bear in mind that if you bring up the menu for a variable, it must have been declared in memory by the LET statement (either at runtime, or as a Direct Command) before it will be recognised by BasinC.

Keywords

These commands are available when you select a keyword (a BASIC command, such as PRINT).

Token Help

Opens the Spectrum BASIC manual at the entry for the keyword.

Tokenise

The Spectrum character set includes a single character, called a token, for each keyword. It is possible (but never necessary) to include a token in a string literal. This command converts the selected keyword to its single-character representation, indicated in the program listing by a hexadecimal value in smaller type.

Note: If you need to store a token in a string, it is usually clearer and more portable to use the CHR$ function. Also, BasinC attempts to tokenise as close as possible to the edit cursor, which can cause unexpected results when one keyword appears as part of another. For example, if you select the TO in GO TO, BasinC will tokenise TO (which is a keyword itself), whereas if you select the GO (which is not), BasinC will tokenise GO TO. The same applies to DEF FN and FN.

You can also tokenise entire strings by using the "String Operation" menu when right-clicking on them.

De-Tokenise

Converts a token, represented by its hexadecimal value, back to the original keyword. When called from the "String Operation" Menu, when a string literal has been right-clicked, you can detokenise an entire string.

Find Line

Any keyword which requires a line number as it's parameter such as RUN, GO TO, GO SUB etc, where the line number is present will have this option available. Using this, you can jump to the line number indicated by the parameter. This also applies to line numbers that are computed, i.e. GO TO 5+5 will move the editor cursor to line 10. As this is evaluated, you can use any Sinclair BASIC expression to specify the line number. This also applies to FOR variables, which will allow you to jump to the loop point (the statement directly after the FOR statement). This will not find the relevant NEXT statement line.

Variables

These commands are available when you select a variable.

Note: The context menu only recognises variables that are already present in memory. This means that a variable must have been declared (using a DIM or LET statement) before it will affect the context menu.

Edit Variable

Opens the Variables window for the selected variable, so that you can change its value.

String Wordwrapping

These options are available from the "Wordwrap String" when you activate the menu on a long string - that is, one that is longer than 32 characters.

Wordwrapping is useful when a string has to be printed to the screen, but is too long to fit into the standard 32 character wide display. By default, the text would flow over the edge of the screen, cutting off halfway through a word if necessary:

10 PRINT "This is a very long string and will wrap"

Will display as

This is a very long string and w
ill wrap

Clearly, this looks unacceptable. So instead, there are word wrapping options available for these strings on the Context-Menu.

Split at 32 Chars - This option will split your string into many strings, seperated by the ' character (the line-feed PRINT item). The split will occur at the first space charecter before the point where the split would occur normally.

Hence, our long string now looks like this in code:

10 PRINT "this is a very long string and"'"will wrap"

Insert Spaces - This option will, instead of splitting the string, insert space characters before any words that will be split to force them over the 32 character boundary. Having applied this method, our line of code now looks like this:

10 PRINT "this is a very long string and  will wrap"

Note the extra space between "and" and "will". This makes sure that the word "will" begins on a new line. It does however make your lines even longer.

Standard commands

These commands are always available on the context menu.

Cut

Removes the selected text (if any) and places a copy on the windows clipboard. The clipped text is converted to .bas format, so any control characters in the text, or tokens from the Spectrum ASCII set will be converted to escape characters.

Copy

Copies the selected text (if any) to the Windows system clipboard in text format. As with the Cut operation, the text will be converted to .bas format before being placed on the clipboard.

Paste

Inserts any text found on the Windows system clipboard into the program at the current cursor position. The text will be processed for .bas format escape codes, and then will be inserted using one of two methods:

If the text contains no Return (CHR$ 13) characters, then it will be inserted as one line.

If the text contains more than one line, then the Add Code Window will be shown, with the clipboard text in the edit field as plain text. You can edit this text to your liking, and it will then be tested for syntax validity before being inserted line by line into your program. If any of the lines will overwrite any current program lines, then (assuming that you have enabled Line Overwrite Protection in the relevant Options Window page) BasinC will warn you with the option to abort the operation, ignore the line, or replace the old line in the program.

Debug

This submenu provides access to common debugging features.