More on Attributes

After The Editor read thru Syd Wyncoop’s excellent dissertation on using direct ink/paper/flash commands embedded within program lines and trying out his suggestions, I took his advice to experiment.

I found that about 2 more bytes would be required to revert to normal ink/paper if more than 1 line was involved and I wanted to do the listing in black ink.

Personally I find a flashing screen or characters rather distracting while inputting and for sure the flashing is both in the listing and RUN. The different gray scales on a B&W screen don’t bother. With the aid of a Spectrum manual I worked it out for the codes 16-20 and not 216-220.

Try some lines like these and you will notice a difference from the imbedded commands Syd described:

10 PRINT CHR$ 16 + CHR$ 6; "THIS LINE IS PRINTED IN YELLOW BUT LINE 20 IS BLACK"
20 PRINT "******"

Line 20 has reverted to the original color without a command because line 10 is a temporary color. With embedded commands an additional command is required. No big deal.

To keep a flashing word off the screen while in List editing mode try this change:

10 PRINT CHR$ 16 + CHR$ 6; "THIS LINE IS PRINTED IN"; CHR$ 18 + CHR$ 1; " YELLOW"; CHR$ 18 + CHR$ 0; " BUT LINE 20 IS BLACK" 
20 PRINT "******" 

RUN and display a flashing YELLOW.

Granted this is memory hungry so after testing the program change the lines by deleting the CHR$s and changing to imbedded commands:

10 PRINT "(E-mode caps shift 6) THIS LINE IS PRINTED IN (E-mode caps shift 9)YELLOW(E-Mode caps shift 8) BUT LINE 20 IS IN BLACK(E-mode caps shift 0)"
20 PRINT "******" 

Don’t type in the () marks. Place the ” ” outside of the commands so you can see where your commands start and end.

For reference see the 2068 manual pages 219-221 and the Spectrum manual pages 85-88 and 148-150.

Thanks Syd, for demonstrating this novel feature of Sinclair BASIC.