Which BASIC is more compatible with Quick Basic

[dioxin]

TheFool,
PowerBASIC appear to release a major update about every 2 years with discounted prices for updates with 2 or 3 free bug-fix/minor updates in between.

Having just checked the website Pure Basic appears to make slightly more regular, but smaller updates which are all free.
Maybe you're right!
But you shouldn't imply from that that the less updated product is inferior just because it's not updated as often. After all, back on the subject of this thread, PowerBASIC has had double precision floats (and 80-bit floats) since 1997 or before. Perhaps it was ahead of the others and the other products play catch-up.
Pure Basic has only just caught up with doubles a few weeks ago.


The only "outdated" reference to my mind on the PowerBASIC website is the proud boast that the PB/DOS compiler won some award in 1993. Although it a good DOS compiler, I'm not sure a 13 year old award is relevant.


As for price, Pure Basic clearly wins, but this thread isn't about value for money, it's about compatabilty with QB for numerical calculations.

try to code your thing in both and compare..

I'm sure that's been done lots of times and it's never been convincingly demonstrated that one has much advantage over the other in simple computations. The differences usually come down to foibles of each compiler.

Paul.

[thefool]

Ok sounds reasonable.
Its true that powerbasic had some things like doubles and so on, wich purebasic REALLY lacked.

PowerBasic has been in the lead once, but i dunno if its falling back..
Powerbasic does look like supporting standard lookalike qb commands too, so perhaps its easier. But i think purebasic is just as compatible, if you look at the code.

About comparisons, you are right again. Its never prooved wich of them are fastest in general (but pb produces smallest exe's )

Perhaps its time for a new test now 4.0 is finally done?

[dioxin]

Perhaps its time for a new test now 4.0 is finally done?

Let's go for it then. I'm more familiar with PowerBASIC so I'll be in the red corner. You can be in the blue corner and the task is to calculate sqrt(2) to 18 digits.

(for those that miss the point of that, you'll need EXTs to do that so Pure Basic will lose! But it makes the point that the test can easily be tuned in favour of one or other of the compilers).

More seriously, I'm quite happy to take part in such a test, but I can guess what the result will be.
I suspect that I'll be able to tweak your faster Pure Basic code by tuning it to PowerBASIC's advantage and PowerBASIC will then win.
At the same time, you may well be able to tweak my PowerBASIC code to Pure Basic's adavangtage and Pure Basic will then win.


But, we'll never know for sure unless we try it..


As for smallest EXEs, are you sure about that? Maybe for trivial "Hello World" type code it saves a few bytes although it still takes up the same 32k in disk space on my PC, but I'm not so sure about more complex, more realistic programs. I would guess that for increasingly complex programs, Pure Basic would start to catch up with or excede PowerBASIC in size.

Paul.

[thefool]

Well, a simple gui app using files and so on, command pipes etc is about 32.5 kb's uncompressed, (larger gui. A smaller example would be a 22 kbyte real life app).. The 32.5 kb's is about 300 lines of code, wich uses different things like files, threads, pipes, gui, requesters, and so on.


I also have a 500-600 (still small) lines app , commercial, data handling wich compiles to under 30 kbyte. and a LOT of that is text, so the actual code is smaller (i mean it generates an html file so contains a lot of tags etc).
just a few examples, got much larger codes too but these were more complete and simple examples..

We should compare larger too. As you say, both can be assembly optimized and so on..

as for size, the few lines are rather complex, some calculations and some memory handling/writing.

[dioxin]

TheFool,
so, where to go from here.

We could take an arbitrary QB app which isn't too big (I don't want to spend too much time on this!) and try to do straight forward conversions into each PB, no optimisations, just as straight forward a translation as possible to see how they compare in speed and size. I suppose that would best suit this thread's purpose.

We could take a simple spec for a program and each program it to suit the compiler of choice. Any optimisations go, except ASM I suppose as it would then be a comparison of ASM programming ability and not of the compiler.

We could each take a program written by the other and attempt to translate it to the alternate PB and see how they compare.

I'm open to other suggestions.

Paul.

[Dare2]

My take on the original question:

If you want to write DOS based apps, use QB or perhaps FreeBasic.

IF you want to write Windows apps, bite the bullet and learn/use PureBasic or Delphi or VB, or you are always going to be carrying baggage and DOS compatibility irritations/limitations.

If you want to get seriously considered for a job, do as Fred said in an earlier post. IMO learning the API is as important as deciding on a language in that case. Like thefool said, PureBasic does provide a very gentle way to learn the API (it is a base platform you can extend this way) so it is perhaps a reasonable intermediate step in that sense.

[ts-soft]

I use to be able to use powerbasic on my computer, but when I try to compile I get this error:

Title: 16 bit windows subsystem
Message:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\AUTOEXEC.NT. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.

It use to work, now I get this error when compiling with PowerBasic. I also get this error using some other applications... anyone know how I can fix this?

Check the environment settings of %COMSPEC% and %PATH%

[Matt]

I use to be able to use powerbasic on my computer, but when I try to compile I get this error:

Title: 16 bit windows subsystem
Message:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\AUTOEXEC.NT. The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.

It use to work, now I get this error when compiling with PowerBasic. I also get this error using some other applications... anyone know how I can fix this?

Check the environment settings of %COMSPEC% and %PATH%

actually I fixed the problem by searching google with the error message, it lead me to a site where I could re-download autoexec.nt and place in my system32 directory... it was missing.
so I downloaded it and placed it in system32 and it fixed the problem

thanks though

[thefool]

TheFool,
so, where to go from here.

We could take an arbitrary QB app which isn't too big (I don't want to spend too much time on this!) and try to do straight forward conversions into each PB, no optimisations, just as straight forward a translation as possible to see how they compare in speed and size. I suppose that would best suit this thread's purpose.

We could take a simple spec for a program and each program it to suit the compiler of choice. Any optimisations go, except ASM I suppose as it would then be a comparison of ASM programming ability and not of the compiler.

We could each take a program written by the other and attempt to translate it to the alternate PB and see how they compare.

I'm open to other suggestions.

Paul.

Perhaps. I think you can find someone who wants to do this, atm i dont have too much time though.

[GedB]

Konne,

The demo version of Pure will provide you with enough information to try porting a couple of funtions, so why not give it a try.

The cost of Pure is much lower than Power.

For PowerBasic 8 for windows you're looking at $199. Thats Windows only.

Pure is half that. For $99 your code will also be good for Linux and Mac.

[wcardoso]

nobody mention PureBasic is multiplattform and PowerBasic...dream about

[blueznl]

dos based program? use gfabasic

[dagcrack]

Why not try moonrock? its no longer supported but I've used it a few times, was useful back in those times.

(I dont think you need anyone supporting a language for DOS anyway, when its -to me- bug free and has all you need)..

http://media.sensationcontent.com/rowan/moon050.zip

By the way, who cares thats better and whats not, after all if you can't decide by yourself, live with it. Its not everybody's problem! (I'm an ass I know, but you shouldnt be comparing languages in the first place when you could simply try the ones you want to compare, and make a choice)...

Just by saying "mines bigger than yours" doesnt mean you dont know how to use it or you cant do the same things

It's mostly up to you. Sure every language has its advantages and disadvantages.. but you should know that already. After all if you dont like any of them, you can always write your own.

Dogcrack:\>ASS 0
Ass mode Disabled
Dogcrack:\> CD Dagcrack
Dagcrack:\>_

[thefool]

Since you disabled "ass mode" can i say that i bet you look like David Hasselhoff without getting killed?

[josku_x]

Dogcrack

Since when did you make a dogcrack.exe? Does it modify dogs so they do EVERYTHING you want? That's cool