Readers Feedback

The Editors and Readers of COMPUTE!

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions you would like to see addressed in this column, write to "Readers' Feedback," COMPUTE!, P.O. Box 5406, Greensboro, NC 27403. Due to the volume of mail we receive, we regret that we cannot provide personal answers to technical questions.

A Few Helpful REMarks

I suppose this isn't a new idea, but whenever I type in a program printed in COMPUTE!, I add one or two REM lines near the beginning to indicate the program's name, the date, and the page number where it appeared. That way, if I forget some command and can't get the program to work correctly, I can always find the COMPUTE! article which accompanied that program and reread the instructions.

John Hibbs

After a few weeks or months have elapsed, it's easy to forget exactly how a program works, even if it's one you wrote yourself. In most cases, you can't harm a program by adding a couple of REMs. However, you should be careful not to disturb existing lines unless you know exactly what the program is doing. Also, this technique is limited to BASIC programs. Some machine language programs such as Commodore 64 SpeedScript begin with a line of BASIC (usually something like 0 SYS2061) so that you can load and run the program as if it were BASIC. If you try to add a REM to such a program, it probably won't work at all.