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[Edwin Knoppert]

If you set a favourite you'll get> "Show unread posts since last visit."
Maybe you can set a title to: JRS - Show unread posts since last visit.

[Theo Gottwald]

>I just have sent an email to Semen. I miss his posts.
Me too!

And who knows who else :-).

[José Roca]

 
All we can do is to contact them to let them know of the existence of this forum, but there is nothing we can do if, for whatever reason,  they aren't interested in participating. I don't like to insist.

[Donald Darden]

I think that PB represented the next stage of BASIC development for a long time,
and it really overcame many of the limitations of QBASIC, such as the memory
model, number of serial ports, and limited data types quite well.

But there is more competition from other languages and development tools now,
and it is less about price than it is about what you want or need to do, and how you want or need to do it.

Price becomes significant when you have reasonable alternatives, and then you become concerned about what you are paying the extra for.

I respect the fact that having the Cafe, that PowerBasic keeps hands off and does not police what gets posted.  It represents a community viewpoint.  However, I do find some of the things said, or the way they are said, rather extreme.  I think the Cafe is also distracting - people spend too much time on it, and it is not productive time either.

I really think it has less to do with PB per se, than it has to do with the fact that  the face of computing is evolving, and PB compilers are not on the bleading edge of what's going on.  In fact, for many people, they need to play catch up in order to compete with other tools that have become available in the meantime.

But the problem with catch up is that it easily becomes too little, too late.  You
have to get ahead of the game somewhere.  And with FreeBasic and PureBasic already available on other platforms, and bringing the separate capabilities of the PB compilers together into single products, where is PowerBasic to excell?

But if you have PowerBasic or buy it, it does not disappoint.  So it becomes a question of whether you will be happy with what you get, or can you get as much elsewhere for less.  Sometimes a lot less.

[Theo Gottwald]

the face of computing is evolving, and PB compilers are not on the bleading edge of what's going on.

@Donald. You could go into Politics. You talent for diplomacy sayings is really amazing :-).

In short:
No sofware manufacturer can keep up with competition if the only updates come every 7 or 8 Years.

Anyway I heared rumors that the newer PB Compiler MAY be also programmed in PB not in ASM.
If thats the case, they can more quickly update them.

The fact that the other BASIC's are definitely ahead in terms of features is just a fact and therefore I agree with what you say.

If I had today to start new with Basic, I'd choose FB, or maybe Purebasic - for the price they have.
Purebasic has an included Visual Designer and the price is really "in range" and is "one time for all updates".

FB is completely free and has a lot of features which make it really competitive for big projects.
Also people say that its quite stable, can't comment on this myself (and don't want to risk it by today :-)).

About Semen, I can say that he wrote me:

If PB will compile 64-bit Exe, it could be useful in very far future. At least, for me.
The reason - it's not a good idea to have separate releases for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.
Meanwhile, 64-bit Exe should run faster in 64-bit Windows.

Actually, in current moment I am more interesting in Wine (one company asked me to transfer my app to Linux).
It was serious progress during last 2 years, and the latest Wine works not very bad

Therefore I assume that his absence is due to the fact that he is actually using "wine" and working on his applications.
Also he would prefer using programming tools, which enable him to output 32 or 64 bit code.

Which may be the case for FB once the gcc Backend is available.

[Charles Pegge]

I think the best strategy is not to become too dependent on the implementation of one particular language. If the code is well structured and simply written it transfers well.

The irony is that x86 assembler turns out to be the most stable and enduring programming language as it has changed little in 30 years from the inception of the 8088 and 8086. By trying to hide the CPU and pretend that registers do not exist, high level languages have introduced huge inefficiencies into computing and caused a proliferation of many different programming languages and 'dialects',

[José Roca]

 

No sofware manufacturer can keep up with competition if the only updates come every 7 or 8 Years.

PBWIN 8.0 and PBCC 4.0 were released in February 2005. That's 2 years and 5 months ago, not 7 or 8 years.

Anyway I heared rumors that the newer PB Compiler MAY be also programmed in PB not in ASM.

And I hear rumors that the end of the world is close, so who cares?

FB is completely free and has a lot of features which make it really competitive for big projects.

DO you know of any "big project" done with it? Apparently is mainly used by youngsters to code small games.

Therefore I assume that his absence is due to the fact that he is actually using "wine" and working on his applications.
Also he would prefer using programming tools, which enable him to output 32 or 64 bit code.

Just tell him about FreakBasic

The irony is that x86 assembler turns out to be the most stable and enduring programming language as it has changed little in 30 years from the inception of the 8088 and 8086. By trying to hide the CPU and pretend that registers do not exist, high level languages have introduced huge inefficiencies into computing and caused a proliferation of many different programming languages and 'dialects'

This is why I always request low-level features, that are the ones that really give you power, and not high-level statements that don't do anything that you can't do using the Windows API.

[Kent Sarikaya]

Seeing the area you guys are working in, usually IT related things, you want to have the low level power of c and powerBasic. I can see how those 2 languages will be used for things like that for a long time.

But I do think that with huge complicated projects like a really interactive, story rich, very cool graphics and interface type games and graphics tools need the abstraction of higher level languages, especially for a single programmer or very small team. Otherwise you would need a team of 30 people or so to put out anything in any decent amount of time on such projects.

I don't know how many of you have checked out eBasic from Paul Turley. Out of demands from many Aurora users and ex Ibasic Pro users he put this language out. It runs ibasic pro programs and will be a lot more when finished. Also it seems it is working under linux, especially ubuntu as many of the users are using that. I took my ubuntu off and never had a chance to test ebasic under it.

I just reinstalled ebasic and have put in some of the command paks from ibasic pro that you can download and they seem to be working fine. ebasic has not 3d support built in, but the opengl pak and the other opengl headers at the coding monkey forums worked fine. I read on the forums that Paul wrote an SDL wrapper for iBasic Pro, I am trying to find that. But that should make for a great 3d development combo when put together.

eBasic does support OOP but you are not required to use it.

FreeBasic is very nice too and seems will only get better. I have not tried Real Basic and Pure Basic.

Also this surprised me as I throught this last visual studio release was the last Visual Basic being released, but the 2008 visual studio is out as beta 2 and Visual Basic is going strong in it, so that was a shock, but less of a shock than if they actually stopped visual basic as I had heard.

The videos of what all it can do is really impressive and it is all free for now and will have free express versions when released. By then most people under windows will have .net for sure, so I think it will be very hard for other languages to compete against free with all the flexibility. The power play from microsoft is going to pay off by then I think for them. I thought they really messed up with the introduction of .net, but it is coming together now and looks impressive and massive as it is. It will be the DeathStar when Orca (VS2008) is complete and released. Now it makes sense why Microsoft got Novell to work on Mono to speed things up and polish it up.

[José Roca]

 

Seeing the area you guys are working in, usually IT related things, you want to have the low level power of c and powerBasic. I can see how those 2 languages will be used for things like that for a long time.

Yes. If you haven't guessed it yet, I like to do research. Too high level languages bore me. If I had to choose another language I probably will use C.

I read on the forums that Paul wrote an SDL wrapper for iBasic Pro,

The SDL headers can be easily translated to PowerBASIC. One potential problem is that many functions return a pointer to an structure as the result of the function. This is know to cause problems if the DLL has been compiled with gcc.

[José Roca]

 

I have seen code to do this but they are usually so complex that remembering how all this works is just to hard.

C++ programmers always scatter the code in dozens of files, making it almost impossible to follow. I have written an OLE container in PB for my own use, implemented as a custom control in an include file.

It does what I need and, for hosting documents, I use it to host the WebBrowser control that, in turn, hosts the document. See the pictures attached to my post in this thread ( http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?topic=772.0 ), showing embedded Acrobat Reader, MSWord and Excel.

[Edwin Knoppert]

Something i have requested
An ole container for documents.
Like wordpad.

[Kent Sarikaya]

Jose you and the good programmers here are doing really cool stuff. It is a pleasure to look at all you guys come up with!!

[Charles Pegge]

José, if you were planning to do SDL headers, there is a full set in the Freebasic distribution. I dont know how up to date they are though. SDL comes in many pieces. I think I counted 6 zips, some containing 3-4 DLLs. Well that's one way to cope with complexity.

[José Roca]

 
Thanks, but I already have done it (well, SDL 1.2.11, not other libraries that don't even come with a DLL). I find easier to translate from the original declarations than from other BASIC dialects. I just want to do some tests to see if it works correctly.

There is just one detail pending: since many functions return pointers to structures, I have declared structure parameters as a BYVAL pointer to avoid having to use the BYVAL override when passing this returned pointer as the parameter of another function. However, there is one structure called SDL_Rect and an union called SDL_Event that will be somewhat easier to use if declared as BYREF SDL_Rect and BYREF SDL_Event (otherwise, we will have to use VARPTR to pass the parameter). Should I do this syntax mixing or should I declare them as BYVAL SDL_Rect PTR and BYVAL SDL_Event PTR for consistency?

[Kent Sarikaya]

Jose, I would use whatever makes it easy to read SDL tutorials written in C/C++ on the web and makes it easy to convert to powerbasic code using your conversion. I have a feeling it that would be the consistent version. But I am happy to see this coming, so will be happy either way!!

By the way thanks for this news. You really are providing us with so many great conversions to make graphics programming fun, thanks so much!