Documentation for FILCMP.BA
---------------------------

FILCMP.BA is a short, relatively fast, Basic program for comparing two
ASCII files.  It is limited to files with lines ("paragraphs") less than
256 characters in length -- so it's main value is in comparing Basic
programs (in DO form), data files, HEX files from CHANGE and the like, and
so forth.

When you run it, it will prompt you for the two files to be compared, and
the output file.  It will then build the output file as a pairwise listing
of lines which are different -- and beep at you each time it finds a
difference.  It stops at 10 differences, on the assumption that, if there
are this many discrepancies, the files have misregistered lines (i.e., one
file has an extra line, after which all lines will appear to mismatch).

FILCMP.BA will accept any valid Basic ASCII file type as an input,
including disk files if Basic has been extended by a DOS which supports
LINEINPUT (e.g., POWR-DOS, POWR-DISK, TS-DOS, CDOS, etc.).  This means you
can compare a large file in RAM with an equally large one on disk and
write the difference file to RAM.  Presumably, with the Chipmunk (or DVI?)
you can compare two disk files.

Phil Wheeler
71266,125