Anybody else tried FreeBasic (aka fbc)?

[Ian Zimmerman]

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

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

One thing: have you looked at the "new" C (C99)?  It is quite a bit more
convenient, just by adding very few well thought out features.  The main
winner is variable length arrays which makes it possible what used to be
done with alloca() but portably and cleanly, and avoid a lot of dynamic
allocations.

I think a lot of the torturous feeling writing C comes from the standard
library, rather than from the language.  Some of the POSIX API is as
botched as anything M$ have come up with.

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