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gwb22c16.zip -- INSTR() not found (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 04.10.2026, 02:12

T.K. Chia (and others) did a nice job reassembling the published GW-BASIC sources for us. His last binary release seems to be from Dec. 16, 2022.

* https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC

I wrote a very quick line-numbered BASIC program just to play around. (It's only 68 lines but irrelevant here.)

However, the GWBASIC.EXE does not support INSTR() at all. Which was strange to me since it should. I tried looking at the sources, but nothing obvious came up.

But I did recall that he mentioned an incompatibility with MASM having its own INSTR reserved keyword. So what happened was he auto-translated everything to "INSTRC"! And yes, INSTRC() works fine!

I would classify this as a (very tiny) bug.

There's also a tiny other quirk that it seems to pad output text files with Ctrl-Z and junk at the end. If I manually delete that, the output text matches that of a run with QBASIC.

Just FYI.

Complete thread:

• gwb22c16.zip -- INSTR() not found - Rugxulo, 04.10.2026, 02:12 (Developers)
  • gwb22c16.zip -- INSTR() not found - Rugxulo, 04.10.2026, 23:51
  • gwb22c16.zip -- INSTR() not found - ecm, 05.10.2026, 13:15
    • gwb22c16.zip -- INSTR() not found - tkchia, 05.10.2026, 18:19
      • OT: disroot.org link - ecm, 05.10.2026, 20:11
        • OT: disroot.org link - tkchia, 05.10.2026, 20:33
          • OT: lfanew meaning - ecm, 05.10.2026, 22:59
            • OT: lfanew meaning - tkchia, 06.10.2026, 01:09