One of the most powerful and complex utility roms available for the Electron, Advanced Basic Editor Plus, is about to be launched by Pres. It was originally produced by Acorn for the BBC Micro, but now Pres has converted it for the Electron, adding a few enhancements along the way.

It is available as either a ROM cartridge or ROM module - a bare ROM in a small carrier that can be plugged in to a ROM socket. The cartridge is priced at £36.80 and the ROM at £28.69 aren't cheap by Electron standards, but like many Pres products, are compatible with the BBC Micro and Master.

Plug the cartridge into the Plus 1, type *BE and the editor takes over, offering more than 30 commands, plus another fourteen from a utilities menu accessed using the UTILS command.

The best description of Advanced Basic Editor Plus is that it combines the features of View with Basic's built-in program editor. Like Basic, the editor has LOAD and SAVE commands, however, once loaded, the program isn't listed with LIST - like View you tap the Escape key and go to text editor mode.

The program is listed on the screen and, like View, you can move the cursor around the screen and type in either insert or overwrite mode. New lines can be created simply by hitting Return. A space is opened up and a line number is automatically chosen for you. If necessary, the program is renumbered to make room to make room for a new line number.

Like View, it has global search and replace facilities. This is useful for renaming variables, for instance, a single command will replace all occurrences of *delay* with *pause*. A marker can be placed in the listing and a single command will take you back to that point. It's useful for remembering your position when browsing forward or backward through the listing.

Moving the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen scrolls the listing up or down. You can also jump forward or backward one screen at a time or to the first or last line with a single keypress. Scrolling can be disabled if you prefer.

Pressing Escape takes you back to command mode where you have the options to save your modified program, run it or return to Basic. Once back in Basic, the program is stored at PAGE like any other, so you can load, list, save, modify or run it as you like.

Advanced Basic Editor Plus is more than a aimple text editor, it has a whole host of utilities and commands designed to make the process of entering and modifying programs much quicker and easier.

It will compact a program, taking out REMs and blank lines, shortening variable and procedure names and linking short single statement lines together to make long multi-statement ones. The process can be reversed to a certain extent - it can't replace your comments however, but it will split multi-statement lines.

Programs can be listed in a formatted style rather like LISTO7, but also splitting multi-statement lines. The output can be sent to the printer as well as the screen.

The Advanced Basic Editor Plus is most useful for structured programmers that avoid GOSUBs and the often abused GOTO statement. However, if you must use them labels can be substituted instead of line numbers. These take the form of