[fpc-pascal] Cancelling Scientific notation

[Frank Peelo]

On 25/01/2010 18:37, James Gibbens wrote:
> Hallo FPC gurus,
> I am VERY new to free pascal and I have a couple of problems. Can 
> somebody please help?
> 1. If a, b are real numbers and I want to round a/b foo to 3 decimal 
> places, the answer is displayed in Scientific notation. How do I turn 
> that off?

Are you using Write and Writeln? For strings and integers, you can 
specify the field width, e.g.
   x := 'Hello';
   Write(x:10);
will write the variable x using at least 10 characters, using spaces for 
padding if necessary. For floating-point types you can also specify the 
decimal places, e.g.
   y := 12.345;
   Writeln(y:0:2);
will write y using at least 0 characters, i.e. no padding at all, with 2 
digits after the decimal point.

> 2. Without using Object Pascal, how can I change the background colour, 
> a very black BLACK, when the program runs? It is strenuous on my poor eyes.

That I'm not so sure of. There used to be a crt unit, so add CRT to the 
uses clause at the top of your program
uses foo, bar, CRT, whatever;
and then you could use
   textbackground(blue);
   textcolor(yellow);
and like that. I guess it's still supported.

Frank