Anybody else tried FreeBasic (aka fbc)?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 01:12:23AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   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.

Well I have used basic.  It by itself is not a very good language for
many things.  Various versions have extended it in ways to try and make
it useful.

ML is much older and has managed to survive without needing many
extensions added to make it useful.  To me that makes it a better
language.  The native support for lists as a type is very handy (one of
the few things I like from lisp like languages) and the ability to
define the same function with different argument types and have it
automatically pick the function that applies based on the type of the
arguments.  Enforcing types strictly also catches many programming
mistakes other languages that are not strongly types easily miss.  no
version of basic I have ever seen has much of a clue about types.

>   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.

Just because it is being used doesn't make it a great language for the
job.  Lots of people use java and I am quite sure for most of the purposes
there are better language choices.

Lennart Sorensen
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