Anybody else tried FreeBasic (aka fbc)?

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 10:53:42AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote

> The object oriented parts of ocaml are entirely optional addons to
> caml (a specific version of ml) that you don't need to use.  The
> language woks very well on it's own.  The compiler is generating very
> nice fast binaries, and it has many nice libraries available for use.

  6 of one, half a dozen of the other.  Your description also fits
FreeBasic.  It looks like a tossup for a newbie who hasn't programmed at
all.  For someone who is reasonably familiar with QBASIC or QuickBasic,
FreeBasic is an easy upgrade path rather than learning a new language.
That was the deciding point for me.

> It's string and list handling makes working in C seem like torture.

  Working in C makes working in C seem like torture.  I tried.  It's
string primitives are... primitive... beyond belief.  Any language where
you risk buffer overflow simply reading or concatenating strings is
b at dly b0rk3n.  Don't get me wrong; for programming to the bare metal,
such as is required for writing an OS or a driver, C walks all over
cpu-specific assembler, and is almost 100% portable between
architectures.  It's supreme in that area, but it sucks at scientific or
text-processing applications.  "Horses for courses", etc.

  For people not part of the scene it may be hard to believe, but there
is a thriving QBASIC/QuickBasic-based community.  It's not a nostalgia
scene like Commodore or Apple ][ communities.  Video games are being
written in FreeBasic (and other QBASIC-like languages) today.  Sites
like http://www.qbasicnews.com/ and http://forum.qbasicnews.com/ (where
FreeBasic has it's own sub-forum) are all over if you look.

-- 
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.
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