ABCs of APIs 11 - Translating documentation for DLLs in MS "C" into Liberty BASIC

Petermat
ABCs of APIs 11 - Translating documentation for DLLs in MS "C" into Liberty BASIC | Introduction

---

Introduction

I am afraid this note is not by your friendly expert Alyce Watson, but by ignoramus Petermat. Why? Because Alyce did not write this, I needed it, and all I can do is to try to find my way. If I fail maybe someone will be encouraged to pick up and correct the note.
Why is the note necessary? Because Microsoft documents it's API's using C / C++ examples

The example I am going to use.
The following LB code is due to Alyce Watson at http://libertybasicuniversity.com/lbnews/nl109/browse.htm.

<span style="color: darkblue;">open "ole32" for dll as #ole
        'free the block of memory
        calldll #ole, "CoTaskMemFree",_
            lpIDList as long,_
            r as long
        close #ole
 
 
</span>

The MS definition at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb762194(v=vs.85).aspx

<span style="font-family: Consolas,Courier,monospace; font-size: 14px;">BOOL SHGetPathFromIDList(
  _In_  PCIDLIST_ABSOLUTE pidl,
  _Out_ LPTSTR            pszPath
);
</span>

This is C++ code. SHGetPathFromIDList is the name of a function - just like LB - and the comma delimited items inside the () are the two function parameters. A C++ function returns a value just like an LB function