New/old programming language making a splash

[Walter Dnes]

  Anybody remember QBASIC (or QuickBasic)?  It's a simple language that
lets you get things done, without every string concatentation being a
potential buffer overflow.  QuickBasic was becoming moribund, but a new
contender has come along.  A posting on Wed Oct 27, 2004 5:18 at forum
http://forum.qbasicnews.com/viewtopic.php?t=7142 is for BASIC what
Linus' 1992 post in comp.os.minix is for POSIX.

  QBASIC/QuickBasic is dead, long live FreeBasic. It's free, it's Open
Source, and it runs on linux as well as Windows.  You can take standard
QBASIC or QuickBasic code and run it with very few changes.  It has
extra features like pointers and various signed/unsigned types, enums,
user-defined-types, IFDEF/preprocessing etc.  Being 32-bit, the limits
are huge (usually 2Gigs instead of 64K).

  The homepage is http://www.freebasic.net

  The official forum is http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=122342

  A couple of other community sites are...

http://forum.qbasicnews.com/index.php?c=13
http://www.freebasic.tk

  The first preview was less than 4 months ago.  It's now at version
0.11b, and documentation is still sparse.  Which brings me to my
question.  At work, I'm in the scientific support end of things.  I do a
lot more slicing/dicing of large textfiles than short memos in MS Word.
Before loading up Cygwin on my work machine, and starting to use bash
scripting (sed/cut/grep/etc) heavily, I slapped together quite a few
quick-n-dirty QBASIC programs, but I never did get into really advanced
stuff.

  Does anybody have QBASIC or QuickBasic manuals or "advanced BASIC" <g>
programming books they want to get rid of?  I checked out a couple of
book closeout sites, but they seem to have been closed out themselves.
Chapters/Indigo in my area have nothing.  I could always check out
"Worlds Biggest Bookstore", but that's a long trip from Thornhill.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml