[DeveloperX]

[tcaudilllg]

Sorry, I didn't complete my programming "school" rant.

Most people don't want to have to tweak something to have to get it to work, or to have to learn an entire NEW system just to get the effect they want. They want something that will WORK. They don't care about the intricacies and "beauty" of the system at all. They just want it to work.

Another thing: this idea about forcing people to use "preferred" practices. It's stupid, and it makes people upset. Lastingly upset. They don't just get over it, because there is no concrete logic behind it. When people are forced to adapt to something illogical, they don't adapt at all. They rebel. Another thing: you'll notice that while there is a lot of harping about "preferred" practices in software, you never see the people who are trying to enforce it actually get up in someone's face over it, except from the safe (and merely annoying) vantagepoint of a forum like this one. Why don't they? Because they know what happens to someone who tries to enforce stupidity: mutiny.

If someone like Unknown is saying that "FB sucks I'm going back to QB", then the FreeBasic project is sadly emerging as a failure. I remember reading about the project when it was first announced. People were ecstatic. I can't say for sure whether or not the person who started it really wanted its "preferred" practice enforcement or not. More likely, he was blasted as "an idiot" or "incompetant" by people trying to bury the Full BASIC way once and for all. I've not heard much about "preferred" practice enforcement from TrueBASIC. Have you?

At any rate, FB appears to be failing as the successor to QB. All is not lost: the project is opensource and the offending "preferred" practice enforcements can be stripped and an independent version made. Maybe I'll even make one for myself. (because without the mess FB appears ready to bury QB, I'll admit) QB was never designed to produce professional programs as we think of them today. It remains a hobbiest, nostalgic tool, which is what BASIC is best at. It is a scientific language, an experimentalist's language. It was designed by scientists for scientists (my nanotech researching cousin once told me they used it to write test programs back in the 70's) and because scientists have always made great professors (for those who disdain the nihllist philosophy of Neitzche that says, "we CAN never be SURE we know anyTHING!") it has been easy for people to adopt this "scientists" language. It's no wonder Bill Gates, himself a business-scientist, fell in love with it and fashioned QB in the first place. (although the interface was pioneered by Borland's Turbo series, and let's not forget Wordstar) Of course it is understandable that people who disagree with M$' software design philosophy (which focuses on making software easy to use at the expense of complexity) would try to destroy it, because they disdain simplicity.

Simplicity is QB. Simplicity is BASIC. Anything not simple, simply isn't BASIC, but something "said" to be BASIC. What is said and what is being, are completely different. QB will not die, because simplicity will not die. So long as scientificially minded-people live, there will always be a way to break down the complex into a network of interconnected simplicities, because that is, simply, who we are and what we do. QB may be recoded, and made faster, and maybe even function pointers may be added to make it more flexible, but it will still be simple, and the first choice for those who prefer simplicity.

[tcaudilllg]

That rant aside, I can't find anything wrong with FB.

RuneLancer, here's an idea: make a version of FB that outputs SNES ASM. :)

[tcaudilllg]

Hey Unknown, try this:

http://www.justbasic.com/learnmore.html

Just don't tell Bjorn. ;)

[RuneLancer]

[LeoDraco]

[tcaudilllg]

Right, but "beginners" didn't have access to it at the time it was made, right? That was my point.

Anyway, to make a port of a PC language to a console, you'd have to cut out all of the non-console stuff from the former, like direct access to pixels, for example. It would require a lot of planning to get across in code, especially for something like the SNES. For example, it would be necessary to strip out PSET, and PRESET, and PLAY. (although personally I think PLAY just needs a redesign for multiple channels) You could set BSAVE to save-RAM/BLOAD to the same, SOUND to sample playback (you'd need something like "LSOUND" to load the sample first), jettison INKEYS$ and KEY ON/OFF, and map the joystick functions TRON and TROFF to the joypad. I guess you would have to do something with the file system... and you'd have to hook PRINT to a default font tileset. PUT and GET would work quite well with tiles, I'd think. The issues of communicating directly with the hardware for data storage and retreival would persist as problems, but perhaps putting substituting the address for the filename in "OPEN" for example, would work. Like this:

[Nodtveidt]

BASIC was indeed designed as a beginner's language...it's what the B means in the acronym: Beginner's. But that's what it was originally, not what it is today. Today's BASICs are far more advanced than the BASICs of even 10 years ago (let alone BASICs of the 60s, when it was invented). Unfortunately, it still carries the label of "newbie language"...if it were such a newbie language, scientists wouldn't use it for their work. :) It is true that BASIC is very often used for scientific purposes...it's one of the best languages for quick-n-dirty algo work and scientific formulas. :)

FB is certainly not failing at the successor to QB. Pretty much everything QB could do, FB can do better. While not everything is directly portable to FB (it's not a QB clone), it's easier to port something from QB to FB than from QB to anything else...it's even often easier to port a program from QB to FB than it is to port from QB to Microsoft's own VB. :) You'd have to grasp for some pretty major straws to say that QB is in any way better. Sure...a language with an IDE that often eats sourcecode (I lost 2 QB projects to this), has terribly slow floating point operations, and doesn't even truly compile to native code...wow! Must be the greatest thing since sliced bread! :D Gimme a break...

Not to say that FB has no shortcomings, because it has quite a few...but most are due to its youth. I've found dozens of bugs in the compiler myself (all of which were fixed though) and the lack of a standard IDE makes it rather intimidating for the newcomer who would then run to the safety of the comfy blue IDE of QB. But for someone who's used to a commandline compiler (or someone who doesn't mind the current IDE offerings for FB), FB just leaves QB far, far in the dust...and most other BASICs as well.

Of course...I could be an FB zealot since I was there at its birth...oh well, sue me. :D

EDIT: LG, making a compiler for a console is no different than making a compiler for the PC...you simply adapt to the system. I myself use HuC, a C compiler developed for the TG16. I've also used DragonBasic, a BASIC compiler developed for the GBA. There's a GCC port for the Sega Genesis which I've also used, and a number of decent 65816 assemblers (plus one half-hearted attempt at a C compiler which never really got far). About a month or so ago, I discovered a GCC build specifically for V810, which is the architecture used in NEC's PC-FX console. So it's clear that retrofitting compilers for other platforms, or even reusing a language across many platforms, is viable and has been done many times before.

EDIT2: And yes, beginners DID have access to BASIC when it was first developed...way back in 1964 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It was first used in the classrooms of the professors who developed it, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz.
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If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace

[RuneLancer]

[tcaudilllg]

Or it would mean both, which would be the best solution.

[RuneLancer]

[tcaudilllg]

Yeah. At the points where it was necessary. For example, you need to do a lot of bank switching crap for the SNES, right? (for the NES that was true, at least) That stuff would need to be prefixed to the start of the executable. Sound samples must be loaded from ROM, so a function specific to that need would make sense. (hence LSOUND) PLAY could be re-engineered as well to organize samples into music playback. A file system doesn't exist on the SNES, so it would have to be replaced with ROM addresses.

[RuneLancer]

Wasn't the whole point to compile FB to 65816? :)
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Endless Saga
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[tcaudilllg]

No because it doesn't directly. Of course you would have to make the changes. That's why you think about what works and what doesn't, and realize what changes need to be made, and make them in a way that is most accessible to most people's psychology.

[janus]