As many of you will know, an automated QBASIC (or QuickBasic) to BBC BASIC for Windows translator is available:
http://www.rtrussell.co.uk/qb2bbc/
In many cases this can perform a 'perfect' translation, not requiring any manual tweaking to make the translated program run correctly.
One of the few QBASIC statements it proved impossible to translate was 'RETURN destination', the action of which is to return from a subroutine but to jump to the specified line instead of continuing execution following the GOSUB statement.
It is my intention to resolve this by implementing 'RETURN destination' in the next version of BB4W (it turns out to be very easy to do) - although I certainly wouldn't expect it to be used in new programs!
The reason I'm mentioning it now is that there's a minor compatibility issue. The following statement is illegal in BBC BASIC because there's no colon before the REM:
Code:ON TIME PROCtimer : RETURN REM Activates timer
Current versions of BB4W won't notice the error and will run as intended, but when 'RETURN destination' is implemented that line will result in a 'Syntax error' until the missing colon is inserted.
Hopefully nobody has omitted the colon in this context, but if you have please don't complain to me when your program stops working!
Richard.
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