Powerbasic

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 2:54 am

I started with PureBasic, then went to PowerBASIC, then came back to PureBasic to stay.

Reason is PowerBASIC relies on the programmer knowing the windows API to do anything at all with GUIs. It does have some native commands they call DDT (Dynamic Dialog Tools or something like that) but they appear to be just wrappers for the API calls and inherit all the API complexities.

And PowerBASIC has no commands that match PureBasic's event handling commands.

What did it for me was when I needed a program with a rather simple dialog with two labels, two text input boxes, a progress bar, and four buttons. After two days I could not get PowerBASIC to behave enough to give me what I wanted.

So I dusted off PureBasic, and in a couple of hours had exactly what I wanted.

Bye, bye PowerBASIC, I just wish my license was tranferable so I could sell it and recover some of my losses...

Brice Manuel · Post by **Brice Manuel** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:31 am

Kaeru Gaman · Post by **Kaeru Gaman** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 3:51 am

> PowerBASIC was $205 and I had to spend another $249 for EZGUI

sounds ridiculous... for that price you'll get a complete VisualStudio2005, ain't yer?

GeoTrail · Post by **GeoTrail** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:57 am

Hehehe looks to me that everything I wanted said has already been pointed out here

srod · Post by **srod** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:41 am

Must admit that I do like Powerbasic, although I concede the point that creating gui's does require the old sleeves to be rolled up before wading through a mountain of api stuff. In that respect you may as well just use c or even asm.

Still it's good at what it does best and it is very stable.

As for PB verses PB? No competition; PB wins everytime!

Brice Manuel · Post by **Brice Manuel** » Tue Mar 13, 2007 5:57 pm

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:14 pm

Brice Manuel wrote:...PowerBASIC's 16bit compiler...

Yeah, I was VERY surprised when I learned that their compiler was only a 16 bit program...

Brice Manuel wrote:...12 & 1/2 years since Windows 95 was released, maybe one day PowerBASIC will catch their compiler up to 32bit technology...

Rumor has it that they are working on a 32 bit compiler mainly because the 16 bit compiler may have problems (if it runs at all) on Vista.

My overall impression of PowerBASIC is that it is still a DOS language with a few half-baked Windows goodies thrown in just so they can call it "for Windows". All it's strengths appear to be in commands that are common to all versions of PowerBASIC including the DOS version.

I too had considered EZGUI but having been burned too many times by the software industry, I won't buy software unless I can try it first and there is no trial or evaluation version of EZGUI...

There isn't a trial for PowerBASIC either, but I bought it anyway, now I wish I hadn't...

srod · Post by **srod** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:34 pm

Powerbasic 8 is a 32-bit compiler!

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:42 pm

srod wrote:Powerbasic 8 is a 32-bit compiler!

PowerBASIC's editor/IDE is a 32 bit program and the compiler does generate 32 bit programs, but the compiler itself is a 16 bit program.

srod · Post by **srod** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:58 pm

Huh, I didn't know that. It runs without a hitch on my system nevertheless.

Post by **Rings** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 2:01 pm

srod wrote:

Powerbasic 8 is a 32-bit compiler!

Powerbasic 8 Compiler is a 16bit Exe that produce
32Bit PE-Exe(DLL)files.

try to run it on a XP64 (Or vista ) and it will not run,
coz they didn't support 16bit win-prgs (Windows.311).

anyway, Powerbasic DOS was a perfect tool which brings me
a lot of money , years ago.
Imho, Mister PowerBasic 'BobZale' was a bit to conservativ
and years behind the actual development.
The Compiler itself was very stable and produce wonderfull
code.My Last offical version was 6.x and i never upgrated up to 8.x,
coz for the upgrade fee you can buy some other good stuff.
And you all know what can be charge for $129.-

(if you don't know, ask in your favorite beverage-shop about )

Tipperton · Post by **Tipperton** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:29 pm

Rings wrote:Imho, Mister PowerBasic 'Bob Zale' was a bit to conservativ and years behind the actual development.

He also actively practices censorship on his forums and will delete any message that is even remotely negative about PowerBASIC. Something I strongly object to.

People can say anything they want about SoftwarePassport/Armadillo in our forums and the messages will stay unless they use vulgar or offensive language. Even then the message isn't deleted, we just remove the foul language that the forum's bad word filter missed. (It will only miss a bad word once!

)

Brice Manuel · Post by **Brice Manuel** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:19 pm

Brice Manuel · Post by **Brice Manuel** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:41 pm