In Liberty BASIC this is accomplished by the CallDLL statement. This statement has many good points, but also some bad points against it. For one thing, it can become rather hard to get all of the parameters correct, especially for functions with large numbers of parameters, such as CreateWindowEx. More advanced LBers have taken to wrapping their calls in Subs and Functions to gain the greater argument checking this provides at compile-time.
I and a few others find the way that Visual Basic deals with this issue to be quite advantageous. It uses the Declare statement to give the compiler all of the needed information needed in a single line. However, more often than not these are some very long lines. Below is a comparison of a couple of Windows API functions.
| Code: |
| CallDLL #user32, "BringWindowToTop", hWnd As ULong, ret As Long
CallDLL #user32, "SetWindowTextA", hWnd As ULong, "Hello" As Ptr, ret As Long |
| Code: |
| Public Declare Function BringWindowToTop Lib "user32"(h As Integer) As Integer
Public Declare Ansi Function SetWindowText Lib "user32" Alias "SetWindowTextA"(h As Integer, s As String) As Integer ' ... BringWindowToTop(hWnd) SetWindowText(hWnd, "Hello") |
The syntax I came up with for VF resembles VB in several respects, but uses some positional arguments and shorter keywords in its simple form to keep most statements from going off the screen.
| Code: |
| Declare "user32" Function BringWindowToTop(h As handle) As Int
Declare "user32", %ANSI Function SetWindowText Is "SetWindowTextA"(h As handle, s As String) As Int ' … Call BringWindowToTop hWnd Call SetWindowText hWnd, "Hello" |
However, this can still introduce a good bit of redundancy for large numbers of declarations. Therefore, I also made a multiline form.
| Code: |
| Declare "user32", %ANSI
Function BringWindowToTop(h As handle) As Int Function SetWindowText Is "SetWindowTextA"(h As handle, s As String) As Int End Declare |
You can read more about it at https://www.b6sw.com/ViviFire/docs/Declare_Statement.html.