Actually using the semi-colon

[KenDown]

Some time ago I wrote a diary program which also doubles as my alarm clock - it rings and displays a message when it is time to give my wife her tablets, for example, which is most useful.

My wife needs to keep track of both her temperature and her weight, and I wrote short programs to record and graph those, but they seemed too arcane to actually incorporate permanently in the diary program. After some thought I added a routine: drag an .exe file to the diary window and it gets added to a particular sub-menu. Then clicking on that sub-menu item will execute the program.

However having the graph program on screen "froze" the diary program, which meant that I missed an alarm! At that point I remembered the recent discussion in which Richard mentioned the feature of adding a semi-colon to make execution return to the calling program without waiting for the called program to finish. I'd never heard of that before and certainly not used it, but it was just the answer, so thanks Richard!

Code: Select all

          WHEN520,521,522,523,524:REM Execute a program
            OSCLI(submenu$(click%-520)+";")
            click%=0

submenu$(0)="C:\DiaryNew\Weight.exe"

Hope this gives someone a useful idea!