What The 'Eck Is *EXEC?

By S. Graham

Originally published in EUG #05

I finally got round to typing in your Text Editor in EUG #1. It works okay and saves but I can't retrieve the text. What am I doing wrong? I type LOAD"" or RUN and it starts to load but then hangs with "Bad Program". What is *EXEC and what does it do? This is probably very simple to you, but not to me.

S. Graham, Staffs

The *EXEC command is used to load any ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) file which has previously been saved using the *SPOOL command. On page 200 of the Acorn Electron User Guide, it is suggested that *SPOOL and *EXEC be used to merge two (or more) BASIC programs. While this is a very useful facility, it is only one illustration of what can be done with these two commands.

To my mind, where *SPOOL and *EXEC really come into their own, is when they are used within a program which will, itself, write another program for you! (Please see my program Drawsave in this issue!)

Will Watts, EUG #5