Hey all i'm new to turing .. i really wana learn alot .. because i am taking a computer programming corse for grade 10 at the moment and i wana learn some stuff my teacher wont tell me.

here is a little list if anyone can help me with it ...

1) Compiling
2) how to make a mouse being able to select things instead of typing
3) when you type a password for a loop to stop how it will appear in * (stars) so other people cannot see the password ( sort of like what hotmail does)
4) how to make lines ( no like a turing help i need special help for that i dont really understand it)

if someone can please help that would be soo great thanks alot!

Hello. I'll see what I can do for the turing help. First off, if you want to compile your programs into running executable files (.EXE files), what you need to do is this. You need the dos version of turing in order to use this. In windows, go to the C:\prompt from the run section (You know, start menu, -> run to get to the c prompt). Then when you're there, type command.com in the box and press enter. The dos c:\prompt will pop up. Type in the path where your turing file is, for example C:\turing. When you are in the folder where your file is, type COMPILE FILENAME.T where filename is the name of the file you want to compile (.t part is the extension, usually you save your turing files at .t's). Oh, by the way, you don't need to put the letters in caps (that was just to highlight).

I'm just gonna break up those four questions so that it's not just one big chunk. The second question about using mice might be a little bit more tricky. It is essential that you learn LOOPS, IF THEN ELSE, AND MOUSEWHERE before you can do this. Also, a knowledge in character graphics/pixel graphics/import graphics will help as well. the command to use the mouse is called MOUSEWHERE (x, y, btn), where X is the x coordinate of the pointer, y is the y coordinate of the pointer and btn is the button value (Where it is given a value of 0 when it is not pressed and a value of 1 when it is pressed). Now, in order to keep the mouse working, you must have it in an infinite loop. For example:

LOOP
MOUSEWHERE (X, Y, BTN)
END LOOP

Try that out just to get the feel for the mouse (This will give you a program where the cursor moves around the screen) I trust you know how to stop inifinte loops when a program is executed (CTRL + BREAK if you didn't know ). Now, to create something you can select with the mouse (Like a button), you will need to know of conditional statements (IF, THEN, ELSE). If you haven't learned this concept yet, turn back now because you might get confused. Here's how I would do it

LOOP
MOUSEWHERE (X, Y, BTN)
DRAWFILLBOX (20,20,40,40,5)
IF BTN = 1 AND X >= 20 AND Y >= 20 AND X <= 40 AND Y <= 40 THEN
%This conditional statement says that if the mouse button is clicked within the drawn %box, (hence the boundaries) it will go through this statement, if not, if does nothing
END IF
END LOOP

This might appear to be confusing but once you learn conditional statements, this is a piece of cake.

The third question, I'll have to think about. I haven't used turing in awhile, but it will come back to me. For the fourth question, I'm not sure what it is that you want. Do you want to know how to draw a line? If so, the command is DRAWLINE (x, y, x2, y2, color). This statement draws a dot at X, Y then it draws another dot at X2, Y2 then the command simply joins both of them together. X Y are your first pair of coordinates, such as 20 and 78 where as X2 and Y2 are your second pair of coordinates 98 and 105. They just join together and use the color (numerical value) that you speficy. In order to use this successfully, you will need to set up a setscreen first. The coding for that is:

setscreen ("graphics:v16")

You need this in order to change the graphics set. Seeing as turing sets up ASCII characters by default, it is essential that this be put at the start iof your program or you will get a runtime error. Anyways, hope that works for you

thanks for the help i understand compile FULLY just with the line not really
the password you dont remeber and i dont blame you and the mouse i copy and pasted that and it didnt work .. the BTN was sayin it wont work .. if theres anyway you can take it down a little notch would be cool ..

thanks a lot for the help.

sincerly

kyle

The BTN won't work? I think I might know why. All of the syntax in the MOUSEWHERE (x, y, btn) command ARE VARIABLES. I'm not sure if you did this or not. If you are still having problems, try this

VAR x : int
VAR y : int
VAR btn = 0

Where BTN is an Integer with an initial value of 0 (Button not pressed, if button pressed, it is given a value of 1).

Try that to see if it works. Oh, and just a heads up, you cannot compile a program with mousewhere in it. An error occurs due to the fact that turing's compilor is shoddy (good ol' dos related bs).

Watch out for the bugs in turing as well. I found a good chunk of them. If you want to know what they are, most of them are posted in the PROGRAMMING thread. Anyways, I'm still trying to think of the third problem with the ****'s. It's on the tip of my brain, but I'll need the actual program to test my thoughts. It's so hard to find a copy of the original turing. That's why God created E-Mule

ok thanks a lot .. maybe i should use C++ but i will just start to learn with turing since thats what my class is about...

also do you know where to download turing for free?
i want it on my home computer aswel so i have something to do and experiment with

Ummm, I was able to find it on E-mule or Overnet (File sharing programs). The dos one of course. As for the Object Oriented one, you might find it in the same place (Hell, you're probably more likely to find that one). As for learning C++, it's best to learn turing first. Turing teaches you programming concepts and it is displayed in an easy interface. C++ is a little more difficult. Best to learn the concepts first .

ok so teach me ...
be my tutor .. that can make money ?
if i can get taught like simple steps i can send money through pay-pal ... no one around here knows programming so maybe you could be my tutor..

Hmmmm, that sounds interesting. I'll have to think about it

I hope you can help.... not many people would ...

I find Ruby is a great language to start with. It's simple, powerful, has industry support, and there's a lot of learning material available online. The environment is, of course, completely free.

http://www.ruby-lang.org

And a terrific book on it is available free online: http://www.poignant guide.net

Sure I can help. I got nothing better to do . Just post up your problems and I'll help as best I can. I won't code full programs and give full solutions in case of culminating tasks and such where the teacher wants YOU to think the logics. But other than that, fire away with the questions. I'll try to reply as soon as possible (It'll take me longer to reply if posted on a weekend)

And don't private message. There may be more than one person who can help.

True, very true. There are other people who know turing. If they're willing to help too, that's perfect.

ok this is all of turing i know so far....

i know how to type in words like put "~~~~~~"
also i know how to calculate numbers
i just learned how to use variables .. like var x:int or var x:real
can you teach me more steps?
just starting the easiest from that..

Do you know how to use functions and procedures?

Functions and procedures provide "black boxes". You give certain bits of data to the function or procedure, and something happens. The key is that when you actually use the function or procedure, you don't care how it gets things done, just that it does.

Let's consider a simple pocedure which prints "Hello, world!":

Now, we can "call" this procedure by simply saying:

But... what if we want to say hello to anyone?

We need to give the procedure an "argument", a piece of data we can use to customize what the procedure does.

Then, when we want to greet someone:

We can also use functions. A function returns a value back to the program, but it shouldn't output or change any variables that aren't declared inside it.

And to use the function:

Procedures can modify their arguments. Consider a procedure which takes two integers and adds the second to the first:

Of course, that one line can be made a bit more concise:

And then, when we call the procedure:

We'll see "2", because the addUp procedure modified "a".

Do you know IF statements? If statements are the fundamentals of programming and in my opinion, the most important structures in programming. They go a little something like this:

Now this might seem like arabic at first, but it's really quite simple. The first like states


IF X >= Y THEN

X and Y are variables. The >= is a comparison operator. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? It means that the value of X is being compared to the value of Y. Now, let's just say, the value of X is 5 and the value of Y is 3. Now the >= part stands for GREATER THAN OR EQUAL. Hopefully you know the comparison operands (They throw this junk at you in math class, hope you weren't sleeping). But if you were, here is a list of comparison operands

> GREATER THAN
< LESS THAN
= EQUAL TO (The same as)
>= GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO
<= LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO
NOT= NOT EQUAL TO

Phew, hopefully I explained that well enough . Anyways, the SYNTAX (form) of conditional statements always goes as followed:

The first value is ALWAYS compared to the SECOND value. So X is compared to Y, Not Y compared to X in the example:

So the value of X is being compared to Y. So let's look at it like this. If X = 5 and Y = 3 then

There, now that looks a little easier to understand. What this code is saying is IF 5 IS GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO 3, THEN DO SOMETHING....

The THEN part tells the computer: "I want you to do THIS if 5 is greater than or equal to 3". Underneath the THEN part, you put something that the computer will do if the condition is true. In the case 5 >= 3, it would be true because 5 is ALWAYS bigger than 3 (Or so we hope ). So under the THEN part, you can put ANYTHING you want the computer to do, if the result is true. It could be a calculation, you can draw a box, you can have somebody picking their nose, ANYTHING. So, to show you what a BASIC condition statement looks like:

It's as simple as that. Mind you, conditional statementsc can go REALLY in depth, but we won't worry about that yet . Now, for conditional statments, there are three different lines of syntax (coding) that can be used:

Okay, so those are the three parts. EVERY conditional statement MUST HAVE an IF part to it. ELSIF is another condition WITHIN the same conditional statement. So, you can have more than ONE condition: This example shows you what I mean:

So, in the above example, you have three conditions. I X is BIGGER THAN Y, you get one condition. If X is the same as Y you get another condition. If X is LESS than Y, you get another condition. This is how you can break up conditions, so if you don't know what the value of X and Y are going to be, this wiil allow for many different combinations.

Now the LAST part of conditional statements is ELSE. This is probably the easiest part of the conditional statement because you DON'T need any comparisons, It's just ELSE. And what does ELSE do? If NONE of the conditions ARE MET, such as if X isn't greater than Y, or Equal to Y, then the computer JUMPS to the else part:

So, in the above example, let's say that X and Y were both 5. Now, the first part, X is not bigger than Y and X is not smaller than Y. So, in this case, the condition goes into the ELSE part. It's as simple as that. Hopefully I've explained conditional statements well enough. Hope this helps

Hmmm, might help if you knew types:

TYPES OF VARIABLES:

INT = INTEGER. ANY WHOLE NUMBER SUCH AS 9, 235, -45, -9
REAL = ANY NUMBER: 0.46, 9.345, -42.54, 9, 3, 0 (Yes, Integers can be REAL numbers)
STRING = Any TEXT (CHAR). Example: "A, HERSD, PEOPLE, AKE, G$H%, 744HD84"
BOOLEAN = TRUE OR FALSE

You probably know the first THREE variable types so I'll just explain the last one:

Boolean is used in CONDITIONAL statements. Think of boolean as a switch. A switch has an ON button and an OFF button. It can't be BOTH, it can either be ONE or the other. Boolean is set like this

Var example : boolean := true
Var example : boolean := false

So, either true or false.

Boolean is used in conditional statements. You just SET a variable to be true or false, then when a certain condition is met, you can have the value change to true or false. In doing this, it will affect different things in the program. Think of it like a chain reaction. You know those rows of lights in the classroom? You know how the light switch usually has around 4 switches? You can turn SOME lights off, and keep SOME lights on. There are numerous possibilities: "All lights on, all lights off, first two lights on, middle lights on, etc". That's kind of how boolean works. Boolean is either true or false (on or off) and in doing this, you can change different things in your program. For example:

Var X := FALSE

LOOP

IF X = FALSE THEN
X := TRUE
PUT "HELLO"
ELSIF X = TRUE THEN
X:= FALSE
PUT "GOODBYE"
END IF

END LOOP

This is just showing (In a loop that goes on forever, so it just keeps repeating and repeating and repeating.) Anyways this just shows how the boolean value keeps changing. X Starts off as being FALSE, then it is compared in the conditional statement, and it's value is then changed to TRUE and the word "HELLO" is displayed. Now, the program restarts, and X is now TRUE, so instead of going in the FALSE section, it goes into the TRUE section where it's value is switched to FALSE and "GOODBYE" is displayed. So, this keeps going on forever and forever., the values are compared, and switched. It's kind of like some bored kid who just keeps flicking the light switch ON and OFF and ON and OFF.

this is sorta going way far ahead of me i just learnt today about string variables please dont go to far ahead (just dont wana get to confussed maybe start a little easyier) thanks