PureBasic Forum

Today I downloaded and installed Lazarus (based on Free Pascal) just to see what it is like.

With PureBasic you simply write code and voila! You have a working program. With Lazarus there is so much bla bla bla and complexity and baggage that you don't just start writing code and have it run. I don't know why people bother with that kind of thing.

Here is the question: What can these other languages do that PureBasic can't? What is the benefit of using some other language?

I will eventually take Lazarus off my computer. I will then have to use Lysol to get rid of the smell.

so far as I know ,with standard pakage,Pb can't produce .ocx,.sys.

I don't know about Lazarus but usually that bla bla bla is exactly what helps you once your applications grow larger than
a simple image converter or a tetris game...

Best is you search the forums to get your answer more quickly...there are like dozen threads about this somewhere hidden on this site.

The basic language was developed (mid 60's) to introduce "outsiders" to computers and programming.

Pascal was designed (late 60's) to be a beginners language for techies--with a goal of encouraging good programming habits. As such, the equals sign ( = , used in comparisons) is not the same as the the assignment sign ( := ). It also prevents you from assigning an Int to a Byte, without specifying that it is intentional. (Just to name a couple.) In addition, due to the lack of memory available at the time, Pascal was also pretty much designed to compile with a small and efficient compiler, and generate moderately reasonable code.

Ironically, if you remove all of the safeties built in to Pascal, you pretty much end up with PB--so as far as what it "can't do", the answer is "almost nothing."

Without those safeties of Pascal, the syntax is almost PB, a typical a second-generation basic. (Third gen adds oop.) PB gets someone up and programming as fast as possible, but the default settings in its "safety" category encourage poor programming habits, just like the original Basic.

...oh, yeah, I almost forgot. Pascal probably has a LOT more libraries available to work with it, but they will not likely be as simple to use (Fred made them "commands" in PB, complete with Help files), and those libraries will not be in one central location as the commands in PB.

PB can create *.ocx see here: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=49057
And a *.sys is only a DLL with the extension *.sys, PB can create DLLs

It is many work, but PB can produce it without problems.

Greetings - Thomas

Programming languages have different features in terms of syntax and semantics.
They have different expressive power, abstractions, type systems, and can support
different programming paradigms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_paradigm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... _paradigms

Maybe the question could be: how much does a specific programming language help you
to express what you want?
How much does it help you to prevent programming errors or help to find them? That's inter-related
with the compiler, type system etc.

Because when PureBasic can't do things, you have to use programming languages like that to make it have those functions. Most of these extra libs for PureBasic are created in C/C++ or are wrappers of libs originally created in those languages.

PureBasic is good for getting the program up and running quickly, but when you need things it doesn't have you still have to go to the language that you avoided in the first place or find a lib/piece of code that was written in that language and convert it for PureBasic

It's good for writing personal tools and utilities though.

PureBasic can do almost anything. There is no need to go to another language to add anything to PB, all this C libs could be written in plain PB as well.

Its the coder that limits it, not the language.

So you don't need to know C or ASM to convert it to PB?
How would you understand the libs/code otherwise?

I dont speak about converting, i speak about writing them in PB from scratch. You dont need C to add functionality to PB you can just use PB.

You also can just import C libs without any convertion.

Actually, that is not entirely true. While PB can "do" just about anything, that does not make necessarily make it as "limitless" as any other language. According to Fred, C compilers have dozens of programmers focusing on optimization. PB has two programmers who do not work on optimization. There is a reason that Fred writes all of his current libraries in C...because it is that much more optimized than PB. If PB was "as good as C," then he would probably write his libraries in PB.

Thats why there is inline ASM in PB. Still you can do anything in plain PB, it's just not as fast as in C. Even in C you might need to handoptimize with ASM. This is true for C compilers that compile to ARM. The ARM compilers are not nearly as optimized as the x86 compilers. So if you care about speed optimization there is nothing better than ASM.

And if you care about coding speed, there is nothing better than PB.

Right, thats why PB and ASM are a great combination. Do rapid development and then optimize with ASM where it's actualy needed. The ASM codes are typicly very small for such optimizations.

For example my image decoder beats libpng by 2 times speed with same compression and same filtering. Written in PB with ASM optimization.

Here is a guy who could use PureBasic!