@pictionaryjr
The commands you've found are indeed a way of making an IDE like DarkEdit. Whenever a program is run, you can pass additional information to the program as a string of text that comes after the exe's name. If you look up "Shell Execute" (might be "Execute File", I can never remeber
) in the help files, you'll see three parameters for it and the third is the optional info.
Now, when you press F4 in a program like DarkEdit, Dark Edit calls "Execute File" (whatever language it's in) but passes in the line "DB.EXE -c test.dba". DB.exe starts but DarkBasic can read the data that follows, and knows it has to open the file "test.dba" and compile it (the "-c" bit).
Quote: "What I'm really trying to do is see if I can figure out a way to make a standalone executable that would be able to make other standalone executables."
I'm afraid the answer is no. This came up not long ago in DBPro, and it couldn't be done - you'd have to work out how to write machine code that the processor could understand an it
is a nightmare. That's not to say you can't make your own language - FPS Creator uses a scripting language that was written in DBPro.
Basically, you just write your language by giving each command a number, and then when you "Compile" your code, you convert all the user's written text into those numbers - like Java compiling to bytecode. You then have another program that reads those numbers from the data file, and then executes the relevant commands.
I'm not sure what the point of all this would be, but certainly parts of what you're asking for are possible, although it would take a lot of work.
Hope this helps!
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