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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

I gather the version of Basic is not Object-Oriented.

So the program most likely is flat: a bunch of global variables (and possibly memory addresses), and instructions ordered by line number, rather than functions or methods.

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Functions yes, and actually PowerBasic does have OOP. Michael didn't use it but it's there.

No line numbers except for goto labels, but gosub is the challenge for transpilation.

Apparently PowerBasic was the successor to Borland TurboBasic and complied to a native executable. So this wasn't an interpreted 'line number' Basic like our kiddie computers. It also probably had the Borland Windows GUI stuff.

(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)

No line numbers but you can use numbers as goto labels. It uses Dynamic Dialog Tools which is a Win32 wrapper which most of my "job" is gutting out those calls, implementing Single Responsibility in functions and plugging in Electron UI. And trying not to break EVERYTHING...

Thanks for clarifying. Super smart approach to adopting legacy code to a modern interface.

Maybe I missed it, but are you still using the Powerbasic compiler or have you worked around that somehow?

Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!

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