By default, Superbase saves it's code as tokenized characters. This means that a command like

SELECT NEXT FILE "CUSTOMER"

Will not look like this if you opened up the program in an ASCII text editor (like Notepad). The words that are known to Superbase (which are capitalized) are saved in small characters called TOKENS which represent the same thing that you see visually.

You can save a Superbase program as a plain text file if you want to by opening up a file in the program editor and then select the Program, Command option from the menu and typeing SAVE "myprog.sbp",TEXT. When you ass the ",TEXT" option, it will then write out a textual version of the file.

Superbase files are tokenized to speed them up. This is because Superbase can use small 1 or 2 character symbols to represent large phrases and words in Superbase.

Exercise

Find a Superbase program on the disk and open it up using the NOTEPAD program. To do this you can start up NOTEPAD in Windows by selecting the RUN option from the file menu (or from the Start bar) and typing NOTEPAD on the main command line. Once NOTEPAD is open, select File, Open and then find a Superbase SBP program file to open and look at.

After you have looked at it I n the NOTEPAD window, now you can open it up in the Superbase program editor and see what it looks like in human readable format!