Some questions in advance...

[Neodym]

Dear forum,

i am looking into doing some hobby programming (interest raised while doing some coding in VBA). However, i don't want to become a hardcore programmer or earn my living on it.

Thus i am looking for a programming language, that offers me lots of comfort on a high level (e.g. not caring much about memory allocation, building structures inside the system or manually programming interfaces with events), while still offering the chance to include system APIs and thus the chance to do whatever i want to do and not being limited to the language itself.

My aim would be to programm mainly for OSX (and on an OSX machine), but it would be nice to do something for the Amiga as well...

I surfed the net a while and stumbled about Purebasic (amongst others). It looks good to me and got some good reviews (especially highlighting the compact and fast code). It also reminds me of VB, which would make the transition easier. After checking the website i still got some questions left open and maybe you could help me making a decision by answering them:

1. Is there a way in PureBasic (PB) to handle interface events automatically (like in VB "mybutton_click()"), so that Purebasic jumps to a special part of the code on a defined event? The code examples in the documentation seem to indicate that PB works with a closed loop which must include all event checks, which can become tiring to implement on bigger interfaces and probably produces unnecessary CPU load...

2. Can i use the same sourcecode for executables on different platforms? E.g. use something like "OpenWindow and WriteText 'Blabla'" in the abstract Purebasic sourcecode, that later gets compiled into the system-specific executable or would i have to use specific commands for each platform?

3. How abstract is Purebasic in terms of I/O and other system specific stuff? I mean, could i just write code like "OpenFile 'myFile'" or "OpenEthernetconnection 'myIP'" or would i have to manually reserve memory, create structures and pointers and all that stuff...?

4. Is Amiga still supported? For example, if i would write some nice little tool, could this still be compiled into an Amiga-Executable? Would i then be limited to - say- the latest Amiga-Version available (with the command-set of that version) or could i also use the latest Purebasic commands with all their bells and whistles (when compiling e.g. on a Mac for the Amiga ...)? According to the downloads section Amiga seems to be stuck with v2.90 ...

5. Can i create drivers with PB? E.g. if i want to implement support for some fancy USB hardware that is not yet usable on the platform... (and i'm not talking about Windows DLL here!).

6. if you would have to be neutral and compare PureBasic to other dialects like e.g. RealBasic / Powerbasic, Ruby or ObjectiveC / Cocoa, what most important advantages/disadvantages of PureBasic would you think of?

Thanks a lot for any answers!

Cheers
Ralph

[Karbon]

I'm Windows only, so don't take just my word for this. However, it's my understanding that anything written in PB for OSX won't run on the new Intel based Macs.

RealBasic might be a good fit for you..