I just figured out another aspect of how SmileBasic's poor documentation is bugging me. It's clear that it is disrespectful to the customer: "We have your money, but we're not telling you what you got in return for it", but it is also disrespectful to their own dev team.
Someone took the time and trouble to, e.g., make the KEY function. They did this so that SmileBasic programmers could have something nice. Failing to document that devalues that person's work. If I worked at SmileBoom, I'd be fuming. I have worked. I am trying to make things better for other people. And the doc team, by not doing their job, is thwarting that.
EDIT: Someone actually made the system so that every command (and user-defined procedure!) with one OUT parameter can be called as a function, and vice-versa.
Now it's my turn to speak out of ignorance, but what do you mean by "the KEY function"? Is it the same as the KEY *instruction* which I suppose was already documented in the manual and in-game help icon? Or is it doing something that isn't documented (which is out of my scope of comprehension)?
NeatNit, Lumage: You actually help prove my point. Even the enthusiasts, people who post here, are unaware of the KEY function, which as lohadl realizes, is different from the KEY command. It is not in either the English or Japanese docs. KEY(5), for instance, returns the string value associated with 'key 5' at the top-right of the touchscreen.
Oh, sorry. I got confused between the KEY command that assigns a value and the KEY$() function that returns a value. The KEY$() function doesn't seem to be in Petit Computer, though. I tested it with PRINT KEY$(1), which didn't print anything, even after using the KEY command. Still, it doesn't give a syntax error, so I might be wrong about that.
In Petit Computer, there is no KEY$ function. If you type PRINT KEY$(1), the system interprets this as accessing the element at index number 1 in an array called KEY$.
wait
There's a function to return the string associated with a function key? I had no idea this even existed. Goes to show how good the documentation is :P
I feel like KEY() may have been a function that was either forgotten about completely, was meant for debugging purposes, or was unintentional. After all, the function name should be KEY$(), since it returns a string instead of an integer.
EDIT: Although, now that I think about it, String=DIALOG( "Initial string", "Caption string" [,Maximum characters]) is like that too.
They're probably lacking $ so their names are the same as their command equivalents. The same is the case with LOAD(), which is used to load a TXT file into a string.
At any rate, these errors are almost inexcusable. It's possible they had rushed the documentation out the door since the NA release was so far behind schedule, but we would have to compare with the JP documentation to find out.
I hate the lack of documentation for things like this, like the VAR function or KEY function. It's harder to get a feel for what an error is if you don't know what the specifications of the function is. I wish that there was better documentation, but I guess the one now is at least better than in PTC (for most things at least).
