TwinBASIC is a modern BASIC compiler
twinbasic.com
twinbasic.com
https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/index.html
The Windows version is a £25 purchase, but the SDL and command-line versions are gratis. It's a great language for hacking around on a Raspberry Pi.
I’m not really a programmer. The reason I ask is for my 11 yr old to hack around, should I find/use a modern (or if not modern, updated, as you indicated BBC is) Basic like the one you linked, or should I have the kid just do cool stuff and basic stuff inside a C64 emulator on the Pi such as Combian64 etc?
Personally I'd love to have a nice 386 with some hardware to play around with, but then again, that's what I learned on.
If an ARM processor still supports the original 32-bit instruction set, then (I understand) that this version should run on it, to the point of this being an important compatibility test for alternate implementations of the instruction set.
Here is some discussion on ARM BASIC V:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=61365
This basic version would have been embedded in the original "Arthur OS" that shipped on the Archimedes, and later versions of (modern) RISC OS.
Supporting this platform is an ideal goal of the project, and in fact, one of the features (GPIO) only works on the Raspberry Pi today :) But there is a long road ahead to fulfill the promise. My vision is to create a minimal Linux image that boots straight into EndBASIC, and extend EndBASIC to give you more control of the Pi's hardware. The idea is to truly mimic the old C64 experience, but leveraging the power of modern hardware / infrastructure.
The "Lite" version of RpiOS is probably the closest you'll get. It just boots to the command line. Of course you could use any version of RpiOS and disable boot to GUI in raspi-config to get a similar effect.
RISC OS is what you want. It includes BBC BASIC V built in and it's probably the fastest interpreted BASIC of all time.
No SMP support but no BASIC ever had that. No wifi either. Ethernet works great, though.
It's the original native OS for the ARM family, designed by some of the same team who designed the ARM processor at Acorn Computers.
It's FOSS now and has been modernized a lot, but at the core, this is a multitasking GUI OS hand-coded in Arm assembly language by a team of about 6 people -- most of whom I interviewed a year or so back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc
In 1987 it originally fit entirely into and ran from 512KB of ROM on the Archimedes computer, and ran in 512KB of RAM. The later RISC OS 3 needed 2MB of ROM.
Even now, the core OS fits into about 6MB. That's not the kernel, that's the whole OS, filesystem, GUI, network stack etc.
It is a late-1980s OS, older than Windows 2.0, or MS-DOS 5.0, or NeXTstep. It is almost incomprehensibly tiny by modern standards.
It was a way easier, more fun and productive experience than doing it for real on an 8bit machine was back in the day.
IMO it is the biggest of follies to consider a proprietary classic VB clone considering that the only reason VB6 died was exactly because its developer decided to stop working on it - it wasn't due to lack of money (Microsoft wasn't broke) or popularity (AFAIK TIOBE had it at #1 at the time and for a long time after that), it was plainly because the only one in control was Microsoft and since it was a deeply proprietary product nobody else could do anything about it (aside from making useless polls that were obviously ignored).
I would still be writing in it today but there is really zero support now. A real shame.
Visual Basic (and others) were unintentional victims of ODBC, the transition from workgroup-based to client-server.
> Naturally, developers benefit from the subscription model by having a more regular income, but customers also benefit because they hold more power over the developer to fix bugs and provide regular updates in mind of you keeping your repeat subscription active.
I'd love to learn of cases for subscription software where subscribed customers were able to successfully pressure a developer to fix bugs by threatening to not resubscribe. Wouldn't bug and feature bounties be a better solution, if indeed empowering customers is the true reason for subcriptions?
I can see how subscriptions might be good for the subset of customers for whom it is easier to use opex funds to subscribe, rather than capex funds for perpetual licenses. It can be the difference between simply submitting a expense report versus going through a months-long series of committee meetings.
Shouldn't that be "we kindly ask" ? (a customer should be free to - say - "grudgingly accept").
I still commonly invert word orders like this at 38 years old. Around 25 years old I realized I did it, and am more conscious of it. But I almost do it on purpose now to get people to pay attention more. My justification is "it makes them think a bit!" And I believe that's good for both parties.
In the context of asking to accept a (imposed as there are no alternatives) licensing model and a fee it sounds to me "strange".
https://glosbe.com/en/en/we%20kindly%20ask%20you%20to%20cont...
https://context.reverso.net/translation/english-italian/kind...
Maybe indian english is different or however has its own peculiarities.
I (author of EndBASIC) have been busy with other stuff since this made the front page last time and have not had a chance to touch the project for the last few months, but I do still have plans to grow it.
Just earlier today, and out of coincidence, I added "email subscriptions" to the front page of the project -- just in case any of you want to get notified when a new release comes out :) If you /do/ subscribe, you may get... 2-3 emails a year, and help me gather how many people actually care about this.
It's great to see someome doing side projects just because they want, not as a way to make some business on the side.
It's very cool, although my first BASIC was QBasic from DOS 5.0, so this is more "primitive" than what I remember BASIC being. Keep up the awesome work.
So, I thought I'd take a look and see how a modern BASIC compiler does it!
Alas! This appears to be proprietary. (There is a GitHub but only for bug tracking.)
https://github.com/skx/gobasic/
My own vision was to reproduce something akin to the ZX Spectrum, rather than the more advanced Microsoft BASIC.
No official MacOS support, though. Only Windows, Linux, and DOS.
Purebasic is like $79 for life.
From that standpoint there's no point comparing it with BBC Basic, Powerbasic, Freebasic, vb.net, purebasic, Xojo or gambas because none of those are in that space.
I'd like to hear more about who twinbasic expects to appeal to and why those people would want it?
Lots of businesses still have critical line-of-business VB6 code and can't afford or have other issues with the total rewrite required to move anywhere else.
And one thing almost every commenter who thinks there's no market is overlooking: VBA. VBA is still huge in the business world. 64bit Office has become the default, but if you want to create active-x controls for it? Your options are... nothing without using a whole different language, usually C++. tB already has initial support for creating 64bit controls that can be used in Office VBA (and any other COM host including .NET, on top of being able to compile to 32bit for VB6 if so desired). There's a number of bugs to work out, but I've gotten some of my very complex controls running. Then you can also make VBE addins. All with the same VBAx64 syntax and language features you're used to with dozens of new ones.
https://help.powerbasic.com/PBWIN10/PBWIN.htm
The Wikipedia page is actually has more info than the official site lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBASIC
"Microsoft: 'We Do Not Plan to Evolve Visual Basic as a Language'" https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2020/03/12/vb-in-n...
MS is actively trying to get people to switch to C# for .Net