Anybody else tried FreeBasic (aka fbc)?

[Christopher Browne]

On 10/12/05, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

By the same token, "good enough" can often be good enough.

If you try to construct the "ideal" language for each sort of
application, you're liable to wind up with FORTH or with someone that
yacc's every problem to death, creating Yet Another Language for
anyone customizing the system to learn.

There are a number of langages around which there has grown enough
"infrastructure" for them to be pretty usable for a pretty wide set of
applications, whether they are forcibly 'ideal' or not.  Java is
certainly one of them.

The set that I'd think of would include:
- C, for sure, as there are boatloads of libraries (GNOME being
probably the most extensive) and secondary tools (yacc/flex/bison/...)

- C++ (which has similar huge sets of libraries and additional tools)

- Common Lisp (where there's *some* weakness for GUI tools, but
there's a LOT built into the base language that, in other languages,
would be in extended libraries).  You can get SQL mappings to access
most popular databases, there are plenty of web tools, and such.  You
can extend the language via macros if there's a need to create custom
quasi-languages.

- OCAML has attracted enough libraries and parser generators and such
that people can build sophisticated systems using it.

- GNU Ada includes a sophisticated set of libraries including bindings
to various databases, GUI toolkits, web tools, and such.  An
interesting bit is that it handles complex string parsing via a
library that provides equivalent functionality to SNOBOL, a noted
language of yesteryear.

- Perl and Python and Ruby and PHP have attracted plenty o libraries
which combine with native string handling to make them pretty easily
adaptable to do lots of stuff...

Amongst these, it's arguable that Java and BASIC are a bit less
powerful as they haven't been quite as big on providing parsing tools,
but the sets of libraries for doing DBMS and GUI stuff have generally
been big enough and the "neato development environments" tempting
enough that people find them suitable for what THEY regard as "general
purpose" work.

Someone who claims any of these are suitable for THEIR purposes is
quite likely to be right.

All of them *are* compiled languages (whether that extends to it being
native object code or not), and are quite likely to be fast enough if
the expected bottlenecks can be expected to be:
 a) User interfacing (where the user has to move mouse or type
something to have things proceed)
 b) String processing (which can harness high speed compiled libraries)
 c) Web processing (where the language can probably saturate bandwidth
unless you have a big pipe)
 d) Database processing (where disk I/O is probably the slow part)

"Best" is always in the eye of the beholder.  These can probably all
be "sufficiently suitable" for someone skilled with each...
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