Microsoft KB Archive/61350

= Disk vs. RAM Memory of Stand-Alone vs. Run-Time in Basic PDS =

Article ID: 61350

Article Last Modified on 11/21/2006



This article was previously published under Q61350



SUMMARY
There is an apparent contradiction, which needs clarification, at the top of page 566 in the &quot;Microsoft Basic 7.0: Programmer's Guide&quot; for Microsoft Basic Professional Development System (PDS) versions 7.0 and 7.1. Page 566 first states: &quot;Stand-alone programs require more disk space than those requiring the run-time module.&quot; Then it states: &quot;Stand-alone programs do have the following advantages, however: Stand-alone programs always require less memory than their run-time equivalents.&quot;

The first statement means to say that one stand-alone program requires more disk space than one equivalent run-time program if you do not count the size of the run-time module. The second statement means to say that stand-alone programs always require less memory in RAM than their run-time equivalents (counting the run-time module).



MORE INFORMATION
One stand-alone program requires less RAM or disk memory than its run-time equivalent if you count the size of the run-time module. However, with a large enough number of .EXE programs, the combined stand-alone programs require more disk storage space than the combined run-time equivalents, which share one run-time module.

To get an accurate indication of the amount of free RAM available when running a Basic program, you should use the FRE(-1) function. If you SHELL to MS-DOS from a Basic program, the run-time module is unloaded from memory to provide more RAM to the SHELL command. Therefore, checking available memory from a SHELL command will make it appear that a run-time module program has much more free RAM than it actually does.

Additional query words: BasicCom 7.00 7.10

Keywords: KB61350

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