features...

[Antoni Gual]

Just guessing..

DATA must be stored as literals somewhere in the program so at runtime the progam performs a RESTORE then as many READS as needed. Nobody knows if a DATA is a string or numeric until READ is peformed so all data is in the .exe as strings.

Initializing variables at declaration is a matter of filling the variable space with the right values at compile time, so nothing must be done at runtime.

If everything is as I guess, variable init at declaration makes programs faster an smaller. We need it...

Also there are probably library headers using this variable init feature of C that can't be ported easily to FB.

[Dr_Davenstein]

But in FB, a new syntax can be used for external data retrieval, such as:

[syntax="QBasic"]
a() = LoadCSV("File.txt")


' and for UDT:

DayLight = LoadCSV("File.txt")


' and reading from DATA:

DayLight = LoadCSV(1) ' 0,1,2,.. DATA lines
[/syntax]

Yeah, that is good. Those would be great additions.

[Z!re]

Code:

Dim blah (1000) as myUDT
open "Blah.bin" binary as #1
get #1, , blah
close #1

I doubt it will be implemented. It's easy to make, a few lines of code. Make a sub/function and distribute it.