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?
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. Thank you so far. The rest of the problems can wait a couple of days. James Gibbens.

1) Format('%.3f', [A / B]);
2) It depends on you GUI framework/library, but in Delphi and Lazarus it
would be "Color := 0;"

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

Good evening Frank,
Thank you very much for your answer. The Writeln(y:0:2); works beautifully. The backgroundcolor is solved as far as the text goes, but the rest is still black. What is the whole area cover by the program, the "screen" called? I still need to down load the help files - so if I am stupid, please say so. I am a retired MAths teacher and I want to make programs so that the learners(?) [earlier we called them pupils / students] can PRACTISE the Maths.

Thanks again
James

In our previous episode, James Gibbens said:

clrscr;

cleans the screen with the currently set fore- and background colors.

Hallo all,
Thank you for all the answers I have received.
Some more stupid questions please:
1. How can I get fpc to use a comma (,) in stead of a period (.) as the separator between whole number and fraction?
2. The window showing the program listing on the screen is rather mall. How do I enlarge it to show more lines? I tried clicking and ragging but nothing works.
3. I want to print the program listing. I click on Files, print and nothing happens. The device is shaown as lst or prn. How do I fix that?

Thanks again.
James Gibbens