You are the beginner here, the guy that has no clue about cross-platform programming.
Don't be so quick to put me in the newbie catagory. I may be new to PureBasic, but I have been programming long before some of the members on this forum may have been born and all with Basic.
Just saying PureBasic is different from PowerBasic. You can't just start and write FUNCTIONs and SUBs.
In PureBasic you write "Procedure" for both. It is just different, and you need to get used to it.
Usually takes some time to get used to the new syntax and coding style, especially if you are used to
PowerBasic/QBasic syntax for a very long time. The BASIC syntax is burnt into your brain, and now
you have to start anew and learn the PureBasic way.
C Boss wrote:Thank you for the link to the poll about PureBasic users !
Developing for Windows compared to Linux 3 to 1
Developing for Windows compared to Mac OS 7 to 1
What was that about Windows not being so important and how other platforms are superior ?
Even a poll done among users shows Windows development is the primary area PureBasic users target.
Did you look at the date on that poll?
For historical perspective it is good. But, the numbers may be slightly different now.
That said, I am a firm believer that third-party Windows-only tools/libs can work as long as there are 32-bit and 64-bit versions of those tools and libs.
Best wishes to the PB community. Thank you for the memories.
C Boss wrote:Don't be so quick to put me in the newbie catagory. I may be new to PureBasic, but I have been programming long before some of the members on this forum may have been born and all with Basic.
And I've been programming in BASIC since it was invented. I accessed the original Dartmouth College time-sharing system from GM's research labs in Detroit. It was the fourth language that I learned after Fortran, Autocoder, and Algol. But it came before Assembler, PL/I, COBOL, Forth, Pascal, .........
I just thought I'd mention that.
For ten years Caesar ruled with an iron hand, then with a wooden foot, and finally with a piece of string.
~ Spike Milligan
Chris Boss wrote:I will be looking at other BASIC compilers for new markets, even considering C (not C++).
You can develop PureBasic libraries in C. If you consider to write libraries for C,
you could make it available as PureBasic libraries at the same time. The tools to
make a PureBasic library out of .obj/.lib files are included with PureBasic in
the folder "SDK".
To get a quick overview how it works, take a look at PBOSL.
It will show you how to make PB libraries in ASM, C, and in PB itself by using Tailbite.
You also make GUI designers. Doing a full featured Delphi/VisualBasic-like IDE with integrated designers and everything
working seamlessly together, could be an idea. Rapid Application Development. Maybe the right job for you, but of course a very big project.
Combined with add-on libraries, and at a professional level, there could be a market here. Can't guarantee it, just my thoughts.
The more platforms you can support, the more potential customers. If you do cross-platform programming, you usually don't
buy Windows-only components because of its limited usefulness. Just something to keep in mind IMO. Of course there are still Windows-only
developers, but I think more and more people are looking into cross-platform programming to find new markets.
are developers who cator to the banking industry using PureBasic ?
I can't answer the question, but what I can answer is this IS something PureBasic is potentially capable of. However, this is not something PowerBASIC is capable of. Most banks are using Unix, AIX, Solaris or Linux. Those that aren't are usually now running a 64-bit version of Windows Server. Compare this to ten-fifteen years ago, when you still had many banks running OS/2.
Some ATMs in small banks are still using a non-server version of Windows, but even ATMs are moving to 64-bit versions of Windows.
RS/6000 systems are still in wide use in banks. Quite possibly the best computers ever made for the corporate world. You simply can't kill them. 20 years from now, you will still have some RS/6000 systems in use, however by then System p or Power Systems should definitely be the dominant system and should have replaced the majority of the old RS/6000 systems.
Best wishes to the PB community. Thank you for the memories.
RS/6000 systems are still in wide use in banks. Quite possibly the best computers ever made for the corporate world.
The nostalgia is strong in this one! I loved working on the RS/6000 back in the day. I used to go to the AIX conferences that IBM would hold in Dallas and had a great time, aside from the miserable heat in Texas. And as far as banking goes, let's not forget about COBOL. Not a personal favorite, but it's still the language that about 70% of the world's financial software is written in.
Mike Stefanik wrote:
The nostalgia is strong in this one! I loved working on the RS/6000 back in the day. I used to go to the AIX conferences that IBM would hold in Dallas and had a great time, aside from the miserable heat in Texas. And as far as banking goes, let's not forget about COBOL. Not a personal favorite, but it's still the language that about 70% of the world's financial software is written in.
I went to a few of the AIX conferences, too. The heat sucked, but I got to come home to more heat in Tampa, Florida, so there wasn't a lot of difference for me. As to COBOL, it was amazing the amount of COBOL and FORTRAN contract work I was able to pick up in 98-99.
Best wishes to the PB community. Thank you for the memories.
heartbone wrote:Welcome Boss.
The command set documentation allows a quick check see if it PureBasic is a viable alternative and worth supporting.
I am fairly confident that the vast majority of the Windows commands work as advertised.
I am very curious if you could disclose the other top candidate BASICs?
Thanks.
C Boss wrote:I am though not flowing with money I can throw away, so I make purchases very carefully. Recently purchase dark Basic Studio because it was very good deal and looked very interesting to me.
To give you and idea of the field of BASIC's out there which I have checked into a number of them: http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=full
I am also considering porting code to C or C++, possibly using a parser like BCX.
To be honest, I have been using PowerBasic for over 14 years and it will be very hard to replace.
Thanks for the link to "Comprehensive list of basic-like languages for Windows and Linux which can build stand alone EXEs files.",
but I've already found the best BASIC for my use.
You do know that was a very obtuse answer you gave, not the answer that I was looking for Boss. (As an aside Boss, if you qualify a statement with "To be honest," what am I to infer about your other statements?)
Considering the amount of time that you must have spent typing this out Friday, I'm thinking this was a little closer to the truth.
C Boss wrote:So what other kind of programming languages do I current have on my PC ?
I have Visual Studio (free version) installed on my Windows 8 laptop for learning how to build Metro apps.
I have an older version of Visual C# (oh I dislike C though) I just bought Dark Basic Studio which looks interesting. (was on sale for onlt $58 so price was right)
I have what is now freeware, BlitzPlus.
I purchased Android for Basic, which looks promising.
FreeBasic looks interesting. I am considering Purebasic, but haven't bought it yet. $107 isn't cheap (for me anyway)
I would even be interested in building a compiler, say via some open source tools. I would have to hone up on my assembler skills though. I wrote some assembler back in my QuickBasic days.
Ideas ! Ideas ! That is what I need right now.
How about collaberations with some of my customers and what they are working on ?
Ideas !
Boss you JUST threw away $58!!! (I'm a DarkBasic refugee.)
You charge hundreds for a copy of your work yet are sweating Fantaisie Software $107 for the best basic compiler on the planet???
Get out of here! (a popular expression of shock not meant to be taklen literally)
Welcome to PureBasic Chris!
I read a few of your articles on your website and I think your views on software generally make you a good fit for PB.
I hope you find PB fits your requirements enough to want to stay and start developing with and for PB.
Looking forward to seeing your contributions here on the forums and in PB software.
Over the years I have written a number of articles for Code Project, Betanews.com and techrepublic.com. I also currently have a Blog which gets a bit of attention as well.
How would you like to do an interview for my Blog to start with ?
You could talk about Purebasic and what it is capable of.
Who visits my Blog ?
I track it and I get visitors from big companies like Microsoft, IBM, HP and Intel. I talk about subjects which interest them, like some failures of OOP, WIN32 vs WINRT, building software for tablets, etc.
To demonstrate my good will, I would be willing to do an email interview with Fred and write an article for my blog.
I won't post it now, but if you are curious about my Blog I will post a link to it at your request, to see what kind of articles I write before you decide.
My company is expanding its reach with the goal of promoting a number of Basic languages. For me rather than a "this Basic is better than that Basic" type of mentality, I would like to promote BASIC, the language, itself in all its flavors. BASIC has been done an injustice over the years by main stream programmers and it deserves recognition for not only what it has done in the past but what it is capable doing now.
In the past I catered only to PowerBasic users. Now I would like to branch out to Basic language developers in general. Now there is one thing I can offer the Basic language developers themselves. I have tracked a number of indie Basic languages over the years and the one weak area I find consistant is the difficult of building a quality Visual Designer environment. Some have done OK with their designers, but few if any had stood out. Compared to the more mainstream world (aka. Visual Studio) it is some times hard for professional programmers to take Basic seriously because of the limited visual design environments they have. You might even find it interesting that PowerBasic, despite its professional level compiler, also suffered from this problem. Bob Zale may have been an excellent compiler maker, but he was sadly behind the times when it came to drag and drop development. If it were not for the third party developers, PowerBasic likely would have stayed that way.
When I first started programming using Powerbasic, it had absolutely no GUI command set and especially no Visual Designer. Then my company came along and changed that. I believe that I was one of the first to build a visual designer for PowerBasic and a number of others followed. But I did something different. While the others built visual designers to simply generate API code, I build a GUI engine (DLL) and I did something unique. You see, the first generation of visual deisgners for PowerBasic, especially mine, were rudementary at best. I took years to learn how to solve problems in building a visual designer. Some on the forums tried to start some open source projects on the forum to see if they could find the solutions of how to build a visual designer. It never got far. Now a couple developers built their own commercial designers and sold them to PowerBasic users, among them the two best are FireFly and Phoenix. But I did something different. Because I was building a GUI framework, I decided to build everything I learned about drag and drop (WYSIWYG) into the GUI engine, so when I wrote my visual designers I didn't need to use one WIN32 API call. My GUI engine did all the work. My customers too have the ability to use those same features to build any WYSIWYG style applications and some use it.
So, I was thinking today. Why not work on making that engine more available to BASIC language developers so they can start building Visual Designer front ends worthy of the compilers they have created ? Maybe that is what I could offer to the PureBasic (and other Basic) communities and in particular the developers of those languages. While my GUI engine is currently only for PowerBasic, it is posisble it could be made to support more languages. Maybe it would be nice to allow Basic language developers to be able to build front ends at the level of Visual Basic and the like.
So what does my drag and drop engine do ?
Almost everything you need it to do. For example, is uses a subclassing engine which allows to take control of any windows controls (even custom controls) and to impliment low level drag and drop features in them. This is actually quite tricky and it requires preprocessing a number of window messages to make it work. Also, if a control has an child controls (which some do), the subclass engine literally has to trickle down and subclass every child to take control of its window message processing.
Next, there needs to be a drag and drop engine, so you can draw a drag rectagle when creating a new control (you draw it in a form). Then there needs to be a snap too grid when you create the control to force it to a grid if desired. My GUI engine even can display the snap to grid in different formats. But you need drag handles around the controls right ? My GUI engine has a custom drag handle control I created to do this, which is integrated into the drag and drop engine. You define a drag handle control for as many controls as you want. Now how about resizing and dragging controls ? The drag handle control handles this for you and it is easy to do. How about selecting and dragging multiple controls ? Easy ! The GUI engine can do the drag rectangles and you can drag hundreds of controls at one time with little or no flicker and quickly. This one task is not easy to impliment. The FireFly visual designer for PowerBasic, while a great designer, has difficultly doing this. It works great for a couple controls, but try 20, 50 or a couple hundred and it was a mess. It was slow and drag rectangles lagged. I spent a long time developing this engine and I have tested it with hundreds of controls.
But more is needed for a quality Visual Designer. Most high end designers have property lists. No such control exists in the WIN32, so I wrote my own and it works very well. This allows you to have real property lists and the control can have multiple property types, from fonts, text, file names, RGB colors and drop down lists.
So rather only code visual design features into a visual designer, I build an engine out of it so anyone can do the same and easily. My current Visual Designer for my GUI engine was written without a single call to the Windows API and not a single GUI command in the PowerBasic command set. Every aspect of it was done using only my GUI engine. There are features in the GUI engine that a Basic language developer could use to build extremely sophistated development envirnoments. Since most Basic developers likely are already using an open source or commercial code editor control for that part, the one thing missing is all the complex drag and drop stuff. True mine is for Windows only, but is uses the power of the WIN32 API to accomplish things most API programmers can't even image how to do. A lot tried on the PowerBasic forums, only to find it was just too difficult. I have spent years honing my engine down and building these features into it.
This is the one area most, if not all, indie Basic languages lack. Building the WYSIWYG front end is just too difficult. None have come close to the smoothness of say Visual Basic as far as the front end is concerned. Now there is an engine which was designed specifically for this task.
I would say that unless your designer/engines are to offer cross-platform support then it is unlikely that they would find themselves a part of the official PB package. The form designer recently added to PB is indeed cross platform and Polo has done an excellent job with it.
I am not saying that your products would not find a place here, but I think it more likely to appeal to individual developers than anything else. I think a lot of the new users to PB come because of the cross platform capabilities as much as anything, though there do remain some old Windows die hards yet.
I may look like a mule, but I'm not a complete ass.
I have to disagree with Srod, as I do think a Windows only VD could find a niche. However, for maximum reach, it would help to have a 64-bit compile of the VD so everybody running the 64-bit Windows version of PureBasic could run the VD.
Best wishes to the PB community. Thank you for the memories.
Why not simply start with 32 bit Windows, the largest platform.
If it proves successful, then there is reason to work on porting to PureBasic for cross platform.
I should point out, that a complex drag and drop engine is not easy to develop and I have spent years improving mine taking advantage of the low level features of Windows. While it is possible other platforms have the same low level features, it is not necessarily guaranteed to. This is why I have tried to point out the importance of native coding which allows for taking advantage of everything an operating system has to offer.
While some may disagree with me, cross platform develop does have challenges and what may be available on one platform may not be available on another. This is why some companies may take the approach of building for the largest platform first and getting it right. Then if successful, trying to port to the next best platform and so on. True it would be nice if this could be done right from the start with a cross platform programming language, but again that at times means not having the low level features of a specific platform available.
A design environment also need not be 64 bit, to support a 64 bit compiler. The design environment can be 32 bit and then simply call a 64 bit compiler (or 32 bit) in the background to generate the apps. This means a 32 bit Windows version would support both 32 bit and 64 bit.
Once a 32 bit product is developed, then steps can be taken to eventually build a 64 bit later.
The "I won't do it unless it is cross platform from the start" mindset limits choices which could make a big difference in getting such ideas off the ground. For years Visual Basic was only 16 bit. Then it later became 32 bit. Initially it generated only a PCode app. Later it was able to compile to native code. Few may realize that when Visual Basic became capable of compiling to native machine code, rather than just Pcode, Microsoft's solution was quite interesting. They used a C compiler as the back end. Yes, Visual Basic eventually had a C compiler backend.
Over the last 10 years, there come one visuel designer after the next, only for windows.
(gDesign, Visuel Designer, PureFORM, PureVisionXP, ...) and i have wait for a crossplattform
solution. Actuell, PB have a integrated crossplattform Designer, not perfect, some missing features
but is crossplattform and Drag & Drop is one of the many crossplattform features of PB.
Greetings - Thomas
PureBasic 5.73 | SpiderBasic 2.30 | Windows 10 Pro (x64) | Linux Mint 20.1 (x64)
Old bugs good, new bugs bad! Updates are evil: might fix old bugs and introduce no new ones.
