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... not talking about the Visual Basic with the point and click form setups, the old "freeform" BASIC that came after the line oriented one (QBASIC or whatever...)...
Not sure, though, if this is such a good thing... sheesh, so many scripting languages and hacks out there... great to choose from a plethora of tools but with all these "non-native" programs, C and C++ are still kings... and, that to me, is a sad thing, as an easy to use, built in GUI (for whatever - Linux/Windows/Mac...) would be cool to develop desktop applications that didn't crash (well at least my windoughz box...) might be a "nice" thing for newbie hackers to sharpen their coding claws on...
Unfortuneatly not. They were intended to be squishy lemmings after I got bored one night playing Lemmings 2: Tribes. I could kill many of them with grenades or rockets. But it was so slow, and so much effort!
I wanted a quick mass holocaust style death for those lemmings.
ps. I had no idea QBasic code was so portable;) Thanks!
I can think of four: "Nothing", "Null", "Empty" and "Missing". Oh, and if you declare a variant array like this:.....
I haven't coded in VB for ages, but the three I was thinking of were null, 0, and I think an empty string translates to null in some circumstances. So I guess there's more than 6 in an ambiguous sort of way.:)
For lack of oxygen. As the distance from the earth to a given point in the atmosphere gets greater, the air becomes thinner; hence, the sky has more trouble breathing at those heights, bringing about the blue color.
It becomes black at night because there is no light with which to see the blue color.
This group says hoorah when someone wastes their time porting Linux to Palm devices (which is useless: the Palm is the LAST device that will be running Linux effectively. Devices like the iPaq, Yopy, and the soon to be released Agenda VR* are MUCH better suited for Linux use), but when a group of people seek to provide something people can actually use you thrash 'em, and it's only because of some kind of M$ association.
Come on... I'll never touch KBasic, but I think it's cool that it's being done.
In my opinion, the problems with VB viruses in Outlook, Word, Excel, et al are issues with Outlook, Word, Excel, et al, not VB. First off, there's nothing saying that apps need to support KBasic as a scripting language. Second, the apps themselves -- if written correctly -- should not allow the same idiocy that Outlook et al allowed from VB.
Besides, M$ didn't invent BASIC. They cloned it from another system (VMS? I can't remember).
Basic is just a bad framwork for system integration stuff. True a modern desktop environment needs a scriping langage that non-programers can learn to use some-what easily.
The unix world alrady has this, it is called
Python [python.org]
which is designed after a teaching language ABC,
and has the nice feature of some forcing of style,
everything is a first class object, etc. Which I
think is a good this for non-programers. (their
code will be more readable, and python code is
easier to learn how to read.) However TIMTOWTDI,
we also have Perl [perl.com] and scheme and tcl. Just to show my bias on what should fill the roll of VB/VBscript under
a non-programmer desktop enviorment.
But I feel that Python does the best job for
the NON-Programmer since this is/was a
design criterion for Python.
Basic has a number of bad feature and I think
we should let the pile of cruft died with windows.
Arrays. Say you've got a function which returns an array of some sort - let's say an array of variants to make it easy. How do you return an array of 0 items cleanly?
No problem. Have you thought of checking to see if the array is empty? Or raising an error in the function (seems like 0 elements would be an error condition in most cases). Or maybe using error handling...
Object-Orientation. Ever attempted type-safe inheritance or polymorphism in VB? Variants do not count.
There are some OO issues, but have you ever looked at the Implements keyword?
String Concatenation.
VB does do a poor job of string concatenation - but there are ways around that. The problem lies in the memory management involved in resizing the string. The solution is to create a fixed length string of desired size and then replace the contents of the string with your data.
...and I code in it (almost) every day.
That is a really sad statement. Maybe you should start trying to improve your skills and stop complaining. It is possible to write poor code in any language. Unfortunately, the ease of use of VB allows below average programmers to pass themselves off as lead developers when in fact they have a minimal grasp of the language. A good good developer needs to have a grasp of the the way the language operates. A good understanding and knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of any language is essential. If you don't have the patience to learn the language fully, perhaps you should switch to another language or stop calling yourself a programmer. VB has a bad reputation as it is, it doesn't any more below average programmers writing buggy apps...
I've seen this error before. A professor that I know took a picture of a sign that was in front of a hotel in Germany: "We provide excellent hospitality for our pretentious guests"
I started learning programming on the apple IIe, which had a basic interpreter in rom.
The only way I managed to learn C was by making a conscious effort to forget my basic knowledge.
The very fact that I had known basic before learning C made it take about 3 months longer to learn C than it really should have.
I code in Java and C++ at work now, and I'm a VERY strong believer in OOP.
I would think the code for a simple calculator would look very similar in BASIC and Python. And after writing it, you could save it in a module so you could go "import mycalc" later:)
Hmmm...this is more evidence that Linux desktop environment authors are blindly copying everything Microsoft does. Surely there was a better choice here than BASIC. How about being a little more forward thinking than that?
The trouble with BASIC variants, including Visual BASIC and Dark BASIC and Power BASIC, is that the languages tend to grow in all directions at the same time, with whatever mish-mosh of features seem good at the moment. After a while, that's what drives people away from languages like this. You need to spend a good amount of time becoming a Visual BASIC expert, and it keeps getting more complex with each release. Eventually it's easier to go with a language with a slimmer core.
Seriously, I like the idea of having a good/great language with a kick-ass IDE. The danger is that a mediocre/bad language with a kick-ass IDE will survive because of the IDE. When the limitations of the programming language become a real problem, there will be too much time and effort invested in the project to back out. This is what happens with a lot of VB programmers; people I know who have used VB (I'm not one of them) hate it with a passion. A better approach is to develop the IDE around a good language like python (which I use all the time); everyone I know that knows python loves it, and it scales well with increasing project complexity.
Those pretty much went away with QuickBasic (one of the few things Micro$oft got right) in the mid '80s. Although, if you check closely, GOTO is available in C as well (although no one actually uses it anymore than they use it in most versions of BASIC written in the last 15 years).
So c'mon, BASIC haters, quit whining. Line-numbered, GOTO'd BASICs disappeared in the '80s. Those arguments against it disappeared years ago when GW-Basic/BasicA/Extended Color Basic died.
The only exception is HP/HT/Rocky Mountain BASIC (used for engineering test stations and the like), probably THE worst language ever produced by anybody. And, unfortunately, that one is still around.
---------------------------------------------
The end of that sig should read "If you are having problems with our products please go to Helen Waite." #$%& 120-character limit!
The whole reason people keep using BASIC is because people can use it.
One of the reasons Windows spread to the desktop so well is because of its wealth of applications. The biggest cause of this wealth of applications was Visual Basic-- a language/IDE that would allow even the beginning programmer to create a useful application for the everyday Joe.
As a seasoned C++ programmer, I fully agree that any BASIC variation could never perform as well as its C++ counterpart. However, as a seasoned network administrator, I can also tell you the sole reason our corporation uses Windows is because one of the critical applications is a Windows only application. While C++ and most other languages provide better performance and control than BASIC variants, a good majority of applications in use dont require such performance and control-- and having a pool of programmers that is 10x as large to choose from usually makes for a better application in the end.
Please, troll moderators, moderate correctly! The above post is Ontopic. It may be many other things, but Offtopic is not one of them.
Here, let me help you in your tasks.
This story is about KBasic, a RAD tool similar to Visual BASIC on Windows, but being developed for KDE on Linux.
My position is that if it is as similar to "Visual BASIC on Windows" as the rest of the K Desktop Environment is to the Windows Desktop Environment, then this would be a manifestly bad thing.
A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.
That's only because you're a snob; a truly optimized version of BASIC could run very quickly when compiled, especially since the basic syntax lends itself very well to Assembler; just pass through, figure out what the variables are, make duplicates of them if they change their types (not often, but make sure A# and A$ are separate, and converted as needed), change the GOTOs to branches, and the IFs to conditional branches, blah, blah, blah...
And it begins to sound less like BASIC, and more like Perl, and eventually more like C...
I hope KBasic will really be based on Dartmouth Basic (the basic that existed before Bill Gates), and that the enhancements all the way to GUI type basic build upon the Dartmouth Standard. It would really be nice to see how Dartmouth Basic could have evolved, and, this time, Gates would truely have nothing to do with it.
Hit that nail _on_ the head.
I understood what was intended, however. After a second or two. I have to work in French or Spanish from time to time. When you have to use your functional but unpolished grasp of a foreign language, you get burned sometimes. I sympathise.
But BASIC?? Good Gawd, why?
I'd never read the Jargon File entry. Illuminating. I thought it was just me.
I worked for an outfit once that had an ERP and supply-chain mgmt. suite written in Business BASIC. It was gibberish. Calls to line numbers and A$, B$, J$, J1$, J2$..J4$ and large, flat files. It's all coming back...
I see announcements like this, and GNOME Office using GnomeBASIC for the application automation, and I can't help but wonder, why not use Perl?
Perl is already a successful open-source scripting language, and there are loads and loads of modules built to do nearly anything most users would ever want to accomplish, or at least get you most of the way there. So why go a build a whole new langauge, when extremely competent ones already exist? I hate learning new languages all the time; some convergence could go a long way, I think.
It seems to me that Microsoft put efficient tools into Visual Basic because the company wants to make sure it doesn't deliver a good programming tool. It isn't Basic that people like, it is the tools available in VB.
Visual Basic is written in C and C++, I understand. Microsoft wants to make sure that its customers are not able to become good enough programmers to compete with its own products. That's why it delivers efficient tools for a ridiculously bad language.
Most people don't seem to realize that the limitations of Microsoft products are deliberate. Windows 98 crashes because there is a deliberate limitation (of 128 K memory, I understand) in GDI and User resources. Exceed those limitations, and the operating system crashes without warning. Deliberate limitations like this are the action of a monopoly wanting to insure that the customers always have a reason to upgrade.
(Run Microsoft's own Resource Meter software in Windows 98 to see the limitations in action.)
It is a challenge for open source software creators not to get involved with Microsoft's destructiveness. Possibly what is really needed here is converter to take source code from a VB program and turn it into source code in a sensible language.
If the conversion could go in both directions, the need to write in VB would completely disappear. This is the desired effect. The present plan, of providing a VB-like language in open source software has the negative effect of encouraging VB programming.
There's a package called 'RapidQ' that IMHO kicks *ss. The compiler is cross platform (Windoze,NT, Linux, Solaris, HPUX, etc..) and it can write almost everything from GUI to console to CGI. RapidQ also has the ability to build single executibles under windoze, which is a huge bonus.
There have been a lot of hybrid features added from C/C++, Perl, and Delphi implimented in RapidQ, which takes object oriented BASIC to a new level...
Check it out... I guarantee it's better than KBasic, plus it's been around a bit longer.
Get RapidQ (it's freeware) [basicguru.com]
Python.
Roll-out is just as fast if not faster than VB or any form of basic.
Its more powerful, developed by programmers for programmers. Object oriented from the get-go. And on and on.
The only thing missing for it...is a RAD/GUI dev tool. Think about. A gui dev tool like vb's...with python code running the show. Using TK....its portable to any TK platform.
I'm extremely surprised pythons imp of TK hasnt been pushed to the forefront of RAD projects for linux. That could be the thing to get all those companies that rollout small...but quick devrate inhouse programs to switch over.
Or maybe...I'm just crazy;)
As someone who spends 50% of each working day in a line oriented 'Basic' environment (the UniData database), I must speak up here.
GOTO's and spaghetti code are produced by the programmer, not the language. It's not hard to produce structured, easily maintained code in Basic.
C has its own GOTO, you know. Nobody forces you to use it, however!
I learned programming by hacking apart games and utilities that were written in BASIC. [...] Now I'd argue that PERL would be the better choice.
Bletch!
Perl has it's uses, but to learn programming with? If you want to teach bad habits, maybe...
Don't get me wrong, Perl is really handy sometimes, but I would strongly advise against teaching people to program with it. It encourages shortcuts that make things "easy" - which is fine if you know what you're doing. A Perl hacker knows what sort of magic is going on behind the scenes. A newbie programmer doesn't.
One more reason to switch to GNOME. At least
it doesn't look like winblows and crash less
often. I got a good laugh too when I read
about this KBasic. Basic much like Cobol
should not be used as it makes it impossible
for people to learn how to program.
First off, I think it's great. Right now, the only people using Linux are programmers who've had more computers than girlfriends, so something like this is fairly useless. But, Linux is growing fast, and there will be more and more people who don't live for computers, but would like to write some quick app.
But, I was pretty sure Basic was Microsoft's property. Isn't this going to run into some type of legal trouble if it resembles the M$ creation? They didn't even try to name it differently, so I think it's likely to be a close copy in context as well.
FWIW, I had access to an apple III and a commodore (as well as numerous apple ][-ish machines at school) when I was a young proto-geek, and BASIC wound up being what kept me OUT of programming... its syntax and ways of doing things seemed silly and arbitrary to me, and I wound up not doing any programming until years later when I encountered Perl, Scheme, and Java.
Oh well; at least it will take a long time to complete...
Please, NO ONE tell them where they can find already completed code or tools to quickly finish this project! Give us time to develop a decent language as a response...
The last thing we need is a custom Macro Virus Language for Linux... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Possibly what is really needed here is converter to take source code from a VB program and turn it into source code in a sensible language.
A difficult task, at least if you wish to make it platform independent at the same time. A lot of VB's "power" comes from it's ability to use COM stuff, which makes stuff like
Set xl = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
xl.visible = 1
possible (This pops up an Excel window, in case you couldn't guess).
But if you were prepared to shift languages but keep with win32 for simplicity's sake... I don't see any real barriers to mechanically converting VB to, say, Python. In fact, it should be dead easy - Python has all the features of VB, including COM support, plus ALOT more.
The trick would be converting it to efficient code, i.e. noticing certain idioms and converting them to Python equivalents - it'd make no sense to use the Scripting.Dictionary object in Python, for instance. The only feature of VB that I can't immediately think of a Python equivalent for is it's "With" statement... which would hardly be hard to cope with.
In fact, I'm half tempted... hmm... I just need to get some free time... [grumble grumble] Maybe someday. Or has someone already started doing this?
*sigh*... here's a shorter one that is quite
pretty. I should point out though that it was written by a friend of mine, not me. I'm typing this from memory, so mistakes are possible.
' VGA Spheres by Peter Aylett
defint a-z
screen 13
randomize timer
for a = 0 to 31
palette a, a*2
palette a, a*2*&h100
palette a, a*2*&h10000
next a
do until inkey$ <> ""
x = int(rnd()*320)
y = int(rnd()*200)
c = int(rnd()*3)*32
for r = 0 to 31
circle(x,y ),r,c+32-r
circle(x,y +1),r,c+32-r
next
loop
Wow; QBASIC had a PALETTE command and a logical and operator? I never knew that, back then!
I could make *my* simple display hack a lot prettier, now! Thank your friend for me, and ask him where he was 10 years ago when I needed him!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
I assume the goal of this project is to provide a tool similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic for Linux. Any other reason would not make sense. While it's certainly a good idea to attract developers from MS platforms, I don't think this is a very good idea now. 5 years ago, maybe, but it seems pretty clear to me that with the introduction of C#, Microsoft is intent on phasing out Visual Basic in the near future. They may not come out and say it directly, but it's pretty obvious that this is what will happen. Consider that VB7 will execute on the same runtime platform as C#, and share all of the libraries, including system libraries, GUI libraries (WFC), etc. and be able to seamlessly integrate with C# code. Moreover, most of these libraries were written in C#, not VB. Microsoft has overhauled the VB language to make it compatible with their new platform, making it pretty clear that VB will be a second-class citizen next to C#, which was designed as the central language for the new platform. If developers can use C#, a very Java-like language which is much nicer to use, to write programs for the Windows platform every bit as easily and quickly as if they were using VB, who on earth would want to use VB? Probably just people who ONLY know VB. Well, all the best developers will all be using C#, so the VB code-monkeys will eventually be forced to make the switch.
But, I was pretty sure Basic was Microsoft's property
Visual Basic is Microsoft's - I'm sure they have a Trade Mark on that name. BASIC, though, is older than Microsoft (Microsoft's very first product was a version of BASIC). They didn't invent it.
Why don't they just wait another month for the StarOffice source to be released? It's got StarBasic, which is finished and works. Then they only have to clean it up a little, move the visuals to Qt/GTK, add KOM/Bonobo support... project finished a year or two faster. --
Having coded in InfoBasic, Unibasic, Universe Basic and PI Open Basic, I know of which you speak.
Unfortunately, working through thousands of lines of code written in a language which makes the use of GOTO so painless, I've become a hardened cynic. It's not just the coders, but the ease with which those coders can effect an unconditional branch (guess where this comes from;) that makes the language a danger to choose for development.
Wait until we see a spec on this KBasic, whether GOTO is included.
I realise this is not a popular opinion around here, but Visual Basic is really not a bad language. It's obviously not designed for use by seasoned coders on large projects, but as a starter language or for getting a small job done quickly...it really is excellent.
No, it isn't.
Visual Basic is a very poor language. The form editor isn't bad, the Object Browser quite handy, the IDE is so-so, but the language is terrible. Here is some food for thought:
Arrays. Say you've got a function which returns an array of some sort - let's say an array of variants to make it easy. How do you return an array of 0 items cleanly?
Object-Orientation. Ever attempted type-safe inheritance or polymorphism in VB? Variants do not count.
String Concatenation. Say you have an HTML page being generated by an ActiveX component called from ASP in IIS (apologies for the MS jargon... this really happened at my workplace though). If you are generating a table, and it has, say 20 columns by 100 rows (or in our case, sometimes more), you naturally would simply generate a big string of the HTML and pass it back to the ASP to spit out, right? But in the process of generating those 2000 table cells, you do quite a few string concatenations. Here's the problem: VB's string concatenation is O(n^2)! (as according to MS, apparently, not to mention our own testing). It can take many seconds or even minutes to spit out something that should be done in a fraction of a second. In the end we wrote a "FastString" component in C++ and used that in the VB. It instantly brought one test case down from 8.5 minutes to 2.5 seconds. Not exactly what I'd call getting a "job done quickly".
So, the obvious question: What's the alternative that's so much better, huh? As a matter of fact, I do have one in mind: Python. It does everything VB does, and much much more. The language is a lot nicer than Visual Basic. *Especially* for beginners. The in-built types are just so much more powerful. Lists and dictionaries being integral parts of the language automatically makes those simple jobs much simpler. (Yes, I realise there is Scripting.Dictionary for VB, but it's not as convenient.)
More impressively, with Python you don't hit your head against a brick wall when you decide to attempt something larger than 50 lines - it's a language that scales well between beginners *and* experts.
If you're wondering, yes I do hate VB with a vengenance, and I code in it (almost) every day. I feel qualified to rant.
I do have to admit that I
kind of miss having to change the line numbers of about 30 lines when I had to squeeze in one more damn line and I was out of
available line numbers in that section of the code.;)
Heh... I remember being annoyed at GW-BASIC's RENUM command and thinking it was a tool for lesser coders who didn't plan ahead. Of course, I'm also pretty sure I actually stuck RENUM into one of my programs somewhere, so it reorganized itself during runtime...
The one thing you have to say about BASIC is that it was fun. I remember coding little games and stuff just for the fun of it. Then I went on to coding little games in C, and writing all sorts of other code in other buzzwordy languages. Yeah, it's enjoyable, but the thrill is gone most of the time.
Here's a thought. I, at least, remember the line-number BASICs with great fondness, and apparently so do a lot of us. Do you think that's because BASIC had some properties that made it fun to hack in (I do) or that it's just because most of us were pretty young when we did that and this is just your standard nostalgia?
I bet you/.ers didn't know you can have algorithyms in vb as well.
I bet you didn't know that VB is Turing-Complete, did you, huh? Or that at a fundamental level everything that can be done by VB can be done by any other Turing-Complete language? It seems to me that it is obvious that algorithms are possible in VB. Hell, they're possible in Intercal too, no doubt. It's Turing-Complete.
Try PostScript. Just because its a language for printers doesn't mean that is all it can do.
-Spiv.
PS - you seem to have problem with "prejiduce" and "loyalists", while keeping a closed mind yourself. Think of it this way: BASIC suits you, so you like it. That is fine, you are welcome to have that opinion. Why can't others believe that OO is possible or even easy to do in C, or that it may even be better to do in OO in C than C++? Just because you like BASIC, doesn't mean C is a bad choice of language for everyone else (and vice-versa, of course...).
As an aside, why did the parent message to this get moderated down?
Just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be moderated down! I disagreed with their opinion, too. But I'd rather see you say *why* you think someone is wrong, than simply say "You're wrong" - or even worse, say it by anonymously moderating them down.
But what about Perl? I think it'll have a shallower learning curve for BASIC adopters, *and* help them on their way to learning C!
Perhaps. In some ways, Perl is like BASIC - it encourages bad habits. (That's about where the similarity stops though).
Of course, I may simply be scarred from having seen too much messy Perl code. It's certainly a powerful language, and I don't mind dabbling in it occasionally. But Python suits my style much better.
It's a personal thing. Which is why, of course, this discussion has become a language war, rather than a discussion of the topic in the story that was originally posted...
you'd think they'd pick a decent, modern and relatively clean language like Python [pythonlabs.com], Pike [idonex.se] or, a bit more esoterically, Ruby [ruby-lang.org]...
Umm... C# is definitely not meant as a replacement for C++. Even many of the new features in DevStudio (or.net or whatever it's being called now) are written in C++. On the other hand, the VB team at Microsoft is hardly doing anything and is underfunded. Seems like a sure sign to me.
Silly developer. Don't you know the fastest way to concat big strings in VB* is to write to a file and then slurp it back in? It only took me an hour to figure out this workaround the first time I came across this.
You gotta think out of the box.:)
Ah yes. MS came so close and yet so far.
(chuckle)
(*) Yes, I'm serious. For those big 1/2-100MB strings it's 100 times as fast. Literally 100.
Yeah, except for the fact that the interpreter chokes when you don't give it the proper number of tabs (just forget copy and paste). It's annoying in emacs, it's unforgiveable in a tty mode.
Visual BASIC suffers from much the same problem as Java. For certain tasks they both are very well purposed, but they are not general purpose languages.
They've both been targetted towards RAD for database applications. As such they are good for retrieving data munching on it for a bit and then displaying it to the user to do something with.
However neither is going to be used to write a new Operating System with.
Part of the whole concept of.NET is to leverage the strengths of the different languages together.
Heh. This guy at work got ahold of a C64 in mint condition (unopened manuals!) and brought it in. We hooked it up to our 52" TV, which was quite a sight in itself, and all the engineers sort of congealed around it and we wrote this goofy program that "received alien transmissions from space". Unfortunately it was lost when someone tripped on the power cord, but I then ported it to a Java servlet. =)
It turned out to be our CEO's birthday and there was a party, so I hacked together a little animation program:
1 OFF = RND(4) * 15
5 GOTO 10
8 FOR I = 8 TO 0 STEP -1
9 GOTO 20
10 FOR I = 0 TO 9
20 N = 10 - I
30 FOR J = 1 TO N+OFF: PRINT " ";: NEXT J
40 FOR J = 1 TO (I*2)+1: PRINT "*";: NEXT J
50 PRINT
60 NEXT I
70 IF I > 1 THEN GOTO 8
490 IF RND(691)<.5 THEN PRINT:PRINT:PRINT " HAPPY BIRTHDAY
KIR!!!!":PRINT
494 C = RND(5) * 10
495 PRINT CHR$(150+C);
496 D = RND(6)*1000
497 FOR I=1 TO D:NEXT I
500 PRINT:PRINT:GOTO 1
It was very surreal to be coding BASIC on a C64 in the year 2000...
I almost never write anything in BASIC unless I'm forced to, but the only fundamental thing I really have against BASIC as a language is what MS Visual BASIC has turned it into.
If KBasic avoids the same trend and doesn't do everything possible to do what learner programmers mean at the expense of language integrity, it might not be so bad... and thankfully in an open source model, there's probably not much chance of this happening.
Come to think of it, as long as it doesn't end up with six different ways to specify NULL, I probably won't be too offended by it. (Off the top of my head I can only think of 3 in VB, but someone told me there were 6.)
Visual BASIC today competes successfully against Java and has 2-3 times as many developers using it in complex projects well over 20 lines of code.
Yes, and I don't much like Java either.:-P
Certainly, having user-defined functions and ditching line-numbers have improved the language immensely. It's still crap though. I've personally written thousands of lines of VB. And for most it, it felt like I was wrestling against the limitations of it to try make it do something useful. It certainly has taken on aspects of other languages. The result is an ugly, cumbersome language with very big limitations.
Thanks for the comments on Python! I'm sitting here, Python book by my side, currently trying to learn it. Was getting disheartened but reading posts like yours fill me with confidence again.
Glad to hear it!
I personally learnt Python from Programming Python, from ORA, which is a fairly good book, but I soon learnt that the Online Documentation [python.org] was invaluable. Especially the Library Reference.
For those who are interested, I have a small python cgi here [usyd.edu.au] . Just to pretend this is on-topic... "I'd hate to write even that in VB".:)
... still has to be GFA BASIC. Such a joy to program in, even compared to modern languages, and it had a decent syntax and a full set of control structures. And I so miss the feature that allowed you to collapse an entire function into a single line in the editor...
But yeah, the point is that pretty much any procedural language can take on whatever aspects of others it wishes. Sure BASIC uses a "novice" syntax, but that's no reason why there shouldn't be an implementation that successfully integrates object orientation and other features found in C++, Delphi or Java.
Unfortunately, VB is only partly there, and a bit of a mess to boot. But there's nothing to stop KBASIC from conquering these problems and producing a clean, useful implementation of the language which can be used for modern, large projects by both people with little programming experiance and those that have been coding for years.
BASIC is not the problem, it's implementations are.
I see that a lot of negative comments are being made about BASIC at this point. I don't know that I'd deploy my industrial strength e-commerce application on BASIC but I still think having BASIC around is a really good thing. A lot of people, myself included, cut our teeth and first aquired a desire to code on BASIC on our VIC 20s, Commodore 64s and Apple IIes. The easy to learn language and use language allowed many of us to learn from coding algorithms gleaned from the pages of BYTE (before it started to suck and didn't cater to the lowest common denominator it was closer to Doctor Dobb's Journal than just another IT rag).
Knowing Perl, C, C++ or the language du jour only makes you a well payed trained monkey. Understanding algorithms and how they effect efficiency is a lot more important. This can be gleaned using any language, BASIC had the advantage that it was simple to use, you didn't need to worry about syntax or memory allocation or pointers.
Maybe spending effort on a modern BASIC is misguided, but to bitch and moan about the language many geeks learned from is inane. I've thought for a while that PERL was the BASIC of the present era, I think its shameful that it's not included on every machine shipped, much like BASIC was not too long ago.
Having a BASIC or PERL that could do native GUI stuff on whatever box it exists on would be a great thing if it was shipped on every box regardless of OS. It'd get more people actually interested in computer science at an early age rather than the current state where most people seem to be in it for the money and have little or any talent.
This Anti-Microsoft thing is getting a little childish now. It has it's bad points, but that doesn't mean *EVERYTHING* about it is bad, and that's exactly why most (not all) people are downing KBasic. If KBasic has anything close to as easy to use and powerful of an IDE as VB does (and FREE too!) this will really really help Linux get moreso out onto the mainstream. The people that don't want something like this to come out obviously don't ever want Linux suitable for the mainstream.
No problem. Have you thought of checking to see if the array is empty? Or raising an error in the function (seems like 0 elements would be an error condition in most cases). Or maybe using error handling...
I don't think 0 items is always necessarily an error condition - there are times when it's perfectly valid to have nothing in a list or whatever
And just how do you intend to check if the array is empty, hmm? Seriously. Show me the code you have in mind. Here is the function prototype:
Function Foo() As Variant()
Show me both how to return an empty array, and also how to test for it.
After doing that, tell me how long it took you to figure out. I'd be interested to know.
[Regarding string concatenation] The solution is to create a fixed length string of desired size and then replace the contents of the string with your data.
Yes, but that's tricky to do cleanly when you don't know the size of your string until you've created it... and the point is it shouldn't be difficult in the first place in such a high-level language!
And as for your opinion me as a coder, without having seen any of my code... I much don't care. It is certainly possible to write poor code in any language, but I'd like to think that I write reasonably good code, and my friends and co-workers (who have seen my code) generally agree (at least do to my face...:-).
I have put a reasonable effort into learning VB, and how to use it most effectively. And if the flaws I've cited above were the only flaws, then it'd probably be okay, but I find the whole language has problems. Those are just a sample of the things which bug me.
I happen to like the indentation of Python. I find it's only rarely inconvenient. Much less than people tend to think.
Any decent editor can cope with indenting and outdenting large blocks of code easily, which pretty much makes the "correct number of tabs" thing a non-issue. Or by "tty mode" did you mean pasting directly into the interpreter? What an odd thing to be doing with large sections of code.
Visual Basic is a very poor language... VB's string concatenation is O(n^2)!
Ouch! They must have worked very hard at Redmond to make it *that* bad, given that the obvious string concat implementation is O(n). That would make naive concatentation of N strings K characters each O(K N^3).
But that is a language implementation problem. Not a language problem per se. Nothing's to stop the KBasic team from doing better. They could do a lot better, actually: with a little thought and a little exponential overallocation in the string implementation, naive concatenation of N K-character strings would be only O(K N lg(K N)).
Don't you know the fastest way to concat big strings in VB* is to write to a file and then slurp it back in?
No, the fastest way is to use a COM component written in C that does it for you:)... we found that a speedup of 200 times was trivial to achieve (talking approx. 1.5Mb files here).
And I shudder to think of a webserver serving 100s of users at once having VB component spew files everywhere and read them back in... ugh!
Did you ever do it on the display computers in a big department store? That was even more fun. I never used the bell... just a PRINT with something like
"YOU COULD BUY ME HERE, BUT WHY PAY $300 MORE?"
The message always lasted longer if it didn't catch the attention of the sales staff.
I knew it was something like that, but I kept thinking along the lines of a function like IsEmpty(), IsNull() and IsMissing(), but of course, Nothing being an object (or lack of, anyway) is treated slightly differently. And of course searching the MSDN for "IsNothing" didn't help...
As has been mentioned somewhere else in this discussion, there are just too many kinds of null (or whatever you want to call it) in VB. Especially as it treating an "empty" variant as an integer makes it magically seem to be 0, but treating it like a string makes it magically seem to be "".
Though there can be no doubt that basic has many shortcoming compared to eg C and C++, it still doesn't mean that it could be the right tool for som developer for some jobs.
An easy language, and a good graphical developmnet environment will encourage development of small programs that scratch the itch of the average user.
Back in older times when my dad bought our first computer (commodore vic 20) I started doing Basic. This continued on the commodore 64, and on our first PC it was gwbasic.
Then I accidently stumbled accros turbo pascal 5. I tried to take a program I made in gwbasic and converted it to pascal (thank god for the excellent help function in turbo pascal), and I discovered that it ran many times as fast on pascal.
Well perhaps others will try the same. Writing
10 print "Hello world "
20 goto 10
is sure an easy concept to begin with.
Besides that for many apps it isn't necessary to have the code highly optimized.
Yes, it had a Palette command that was incredibly slow... you were much better off using:
outp &h3c8, r
outp &h3c8, g
outp &h3c8, b
outp &h3c9, index
(I think... it's been a while)
Incidentally, QBasic did have a logical and, but I didn't use it in that program... you're probably confusing the notation for hex with that. The and operator was simply "And", IIRC.
Gnome already has a nicely designed alpha of Gnome Basic (http://www.gnome.org:65348/gb/). This is really a point where KDE and Gnome should cooperate. While they will certainly need to have different front end GUIs, a lot of the back end code can be abstracted into a library and used by both projects. Since they are constrained by a pseudo-standard set by Microsoft, it is not like they will be too inconvenienced by working together.
I hope the KDE team is willing to lend their assistance so that both projects are speeded to completion.
Now, before everyone starts screaming about viruses and the need for this, let me add another thought. At least for Gnome Basic, Michael Meeks was very conscientious about making gb have a secure sandbox from which an evil virus could not escape. The worst thing that can happen right now is DoS RAM consumption.
Also, there is an actual need for Basic in both Gnome and KDE. If we are going to capture any portion of the business users, Open Source must offer spreadsheets and word processors which are compatible with Micro$oft Basic. A large number of companies have huge collections of pre-existing documents which *must* work correctly or they will never even consider switching to Linux/BSD. Gnome Office and K Office must provide this capability before they can make serious inroads in the corporate world.
I applaud the KBasic team for their efforts and I wish them well on a successful implemntation of KBasic.
To all of you Linux Hypocrites out there who are spitting on a legitimate GNU/Free Software project, I have a few words for you. KBasic could, in fact catapult Linux onto many corporate desktops almost overnight, I would like to remind all of you that if it were not for the toolset M$ provides to actually code something for the Windows platform, I don't think that corporate America would have remained stuck in Windows for so long.
Certainly Visual Basic is is one of those tools. The bottom line in corporate America is that a button is a button and a combo box is a combo box, and a text box is a text box. Corporate America wants tools that are easy to use so they can:
1) connect to their databases
2) put stuff into them, pull stuff out of them,
3)and maybe show the user a little something along the way.
It seems like the KBasic team has the vision thing and all of you who posted negatively about a VB or Basic clone, will be kissing their feet in a few years.
But, as a Linux newbie who has several years experience with VB (since the 3.0 days), I think this is a step in the right direction - but not for the reasons you may think...
Forget the language - it's the IDE that I want.
This is probably the ONLY thing M$ has done right - an IDE that has a "forms" editor (to lay out your windows), an attribute settings editor (to modify controls), code editing windows (intrinsically tied to the controls*), and controls to drop on the form, to build the forms easily.
I don't know of any comparable system for Linux (now, I know I am showing my lack of Linux knowledge here - I am sure there are good IDEs, and code editors, and maybe even form layout editors for X - who knows? - I just haven't gotten to the point of investigating about them yet). I know there is some similar things for Java...
After I learned C/C++ (stronger in C than C++ - yes, amazingly I am a coder who knows about both!), I realized that what I wanted was the ability to have an IDE like VB's, but the ability to write the "glue" code in C/C++ (and glue code is what most of VB is - it is almost possible to build an app in VB, that does useful work, without writing a line of code - that isn't to say it will be a perfect app - nay, one needs to add code to add exception handling, so that one doesn't screw up a DB table or something). Such a beast has yet to appear - the closest I have seen has been some of the Java IDEs.
If this could be done - if the Linux dev community can see past it's arrogance (yes, VB is limiting in some respects, but it is also very powerful - if only in the RAD arena alone - once you know how to leverage it, it can be great for many types of applications - Quake clone? Unlikely - Frontend for data visualization - Done every day), they would realize the importance of the IDE, and not of the language (this also assumes the IDE will be extractable from the rest of the code).
(*) - This is one of the powers of the VB IDE above VisualC (and the few other IDEs for other languages/platforms). With VisualC, one must build the form(s), then build the code, then do a wierd "hooking" process to "attach" the code to the various events that the form sends out, so that when an event occurs, the code is executed (and overrides a default action). Then the programmer can compile and link the app to form an executable. I like the way VB does this - just double-click the control, select the event procedure to override, and code - then compile to "test" the app. A real RAD tool...
To be honest, the last I saw of this was in version 4.2 - I have not seen what is in the current version of VisualC. But can you simply click on say a text box, (or pop the wizard) and have a new method of Text1_Change() appear?
Might have to investigate it further (though I am doing less and less on my doze box as time goes by - been having a real fun time lately patching my kernel to 2.2.14 to get my Zip drive working properly)...
Arrgh! There are already a bunch of great form/UI designers for Qt/KDE, like QtDesigner from TrollTech (GPL). Why recreate one of these? QtDesigner is all XML-output-based, so you could certainly use that. There's already QtDesigner-python module (http://www.thekompany.com/projects/pykde/?dhtml_o k=1) that could be a basis. Plus, QtEz and the KDevelop dialog designer have good starts as well.
Anyways, of course they have a right to do whatever they want with their free time, but I hope that all the designers are aware of the great choices out there.
Really, the key to Visual Basic is that you can easily add a new widget (component, VBX, whatever) and have it integrate smoothly into the designer. Without that feature, these GUI designers are really just going to be toys, sadly.
--JRZ
' tap <SHIFT-F5> to start the cleansing
' QBasic Lemmings screen saver version 1.1 for slashdot.
' -- fixed stupid greater/less than signs in code
SCREEN 13
LOCATE 8, 3: PRINT "10 Million Lemmings Can't be Wrong"
LOCATE 10, 15: PRINT "contact"
COLOR 7: LOCATE 14, 9: PRINT "tomtomdrum@yahoo.com"
COLOR 8: LOCATE 22, 23: PRINT "<ESC> to quit": SLEEP 5
' OPTIONS MENU (well maybe)
gravity =.6 'gravity inflicted on the lemmings
chanceoffalling = 30 'the random odds of starting to fall, it gives a tricle effect to the jumping, the odds of falling are 1/chanceoffalling
nooflemmings = 50 'the number of lemmings on the screen at one time
SCREEN 12 'the screen mode
mx = 640 'the X axis res for the screen mode
my = 480 'the Y axis res for the screen mode
wobble = 3 'the wobble on the lemmings (left & right) as they fall, it is +- wobble each side in pixels
bloodcolour = 4 'the colour of the lemming mush
bloodrange = 5 'the amount lemming mush width to be left when a lemming dies. in a pyramid shape
' END OF (GA?) MENU
' MAIN PROGRAM
RANDOMIZE TIMER
DIM a(nooflemmings, 1, 1), b(mx)
FOR i = 1 TO nooflemmings
a(i, 0, 0) = INT(RND * mx) + 1
a(i, 1, 0) = -5
NEXT i
The member list [kbasic.de]. Read down at the bottom, at the "Additional thanks to" section. Or rather read the BLANK space there.
Yes my fellow working class GNULIX user, those bastard capitalists programmers list only themselves as creating KBasic. I ask you - should not the man who created thier keyboards be listed too? Or the workers at the powerplant who provide the electricity needed for them to program? Or even Ivan who runs the breadstore down the road for providing nourishment to the programmers?
I also see they have released this software under the GPL. Blasphemy! Marx is spinning in his grave at this. How can the bourgeoisie release such foul capitalist inspired code under the sacred socialist liscence - the GPL?
Yes my fellow men, abandon KBasic as you would abandon your class in society. As you would embrace Lenin, embrace the One True BASIC - GWBASIC!
Agreed (good old Atari ST...;) ) as far as the older versions are concerned. The stuff they've been pushing out recently is crap [I don't know why I'm still getting all their betas, but I won't complain about that].
Their (yuck!) Win32 port closely resembles a (yuck!!!) VB clone, but at least it works in wine.
the point is that pretty much any procedural language can take on whatever aspects of others it wishes
without remaining compatible, though, unfortunately. More fragmentation in programming languages ("this program requires xyz's implementation of the abc compiler, version 1.23.45") is just what we need (not).
Still, KBasic is probably a good idea - it will make it much easier for VB programmers to port their stuff to real OSes.
The only people using basic are
a) Those who write or maintain Windows gui/components/ASP
b) Those without the balls to learn Java
If they wanted to do something useful, they would write a Java IDE. But that has already been done by Forte/Sun. It seems all KDE wants to do is make linux into a Windows clone, or create a sandbox for newbies.
Now I'm not criticising basic. It had its day a couple of years back in Office 97 and VB5, but you have to move with the times and cross platform, OO is the way forward.
People like Basic because -- for them -- thinking in Basic is easier than thinking in C, C++, Perl, etc. Get over it.
For some, it is the other way around. Get over it.
This is about computers, folks. Not the One True Faith. It is all bits in the end.
If you think the difference between Basic and, say, Perl is something that r-e-a-l-l-y matters to the future of the human race, then let me point you to a nearby monastery.
The only people using basic are
a) Those who write or maintain Windows gui/components/ASP
They're all potential users of real OSes who just haven't used them yet.;)
Actually I know some people who match this description and who would move to a real OS if they didn't have to rewrite all their stuff in a totally different language.
Rewriting 20000 lines of BASIC code in C, C++ or Java is not exactly a fast or interesting job.
b) Those without the balls to learn Java
While there's no really working free JDK (kaffe still isn't there, probably some time in the future...), there are other reasons not to do Java.
If they wanted to do something useful, they would write a Java IDE
Plus a free JVM and JDK... Without these, a Java IDE is pretty much useless.
It seems all KDE wants to do is make linux into a Windows clone
No way. KDE doesn't have a bluescreen module, a "send-everything-to-microsoft"-feature (aka windowsupdate.microsoft.com), useless drive letters,...
KDE is just trying to make the transition from a broken OS to a real OS as easy as possible, which is a good thing.
Basic is definitely not the greatest programming languages, but basic variants are still quite easy to get for people who haven't done programming before (and who don't want to be serious programmers).
Reading the site seems to indicate a functional but unpolished grasp of English. Their claim that the project is "pretentious" smacks of a trasnlation problem.
Here's definition number one of pretentious from dictionary.com: "Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified."
So I can easily see how this might be mistaken for "difficult" or "involved" by a non native speaker. Especially given the, ahem, high quality of cross-language dictionaries in the world.;) --
Well, it's an order of magnitude better than VB...
I've got a few specific things I don't like about Java. It borrows heavily from C syntax, yet somehow loses alot of the terseness - which seems like the worst of both worlds. It's doesn't have templates, which severely limits it as well, IMHO.
But mainly, I just don't like the *feel* of the language. I don't enjoy programming in it, so I don't use it. It's certainly a personal thing. I do like that it has a large standard library (although some parts aren't particularly pretty). And it has other things going for it (like JPython:-), but overall, it's not my thing.
There is a lot of reason why Linux can and should replace Windows as a desktop OS. For many, this is already the case-- but for most, this is far from the case. One of the major things holding Linux back as a desktop OS is the lack of a solid, gui-based BASIC language to create apps for it. Historically, Visual Basic was one of the key elements in spreading Windows to so many desktops-- such a vast range of programmers, from basic beginners to advanced gurus, could use it to create apps that anyone could use. The abundance of applications written for Windows is basically the sole reason anyone I know uses Windows. The ability to create applications with the same speed and BASIC language syntax as Windows programmers enjoy would be a great boost to spreading Linux (and even other UNIX OS's) to the desktop.
Ok, before anyone jumps to any rash conclusions or gets into state of nastiness...the Gnome project is up the same mischief.....I wonder if this is really good for the linux X-windows environment? It seems to be the trend.
http://www.gnome.org:65348/gb/
On the plus side, contemporary Linux developers will garner some hard-core experience dealing with the wickedness that comes with churing out your own language. I have already taken Theory of Automata and Compiler Theory and found that more than a little challenging. I think it will be a good warm-up for something better.
It fits...I mean if LynuxWorks [lynuxworks.com] is going to sell a product [lynuxworks.com] for VC++ users to "leverage Visual C++ to develop Linux software." Then why shouldn't linux have a tool to attract VB programmers to Linux' to program M$ VBA apps.
Re:GNOME Basic + Viruses (Score:2)
BASIC is a "nice" language for beginners ... (Score:1)
Re:First QBasic Lemmings Screen Saver (Score:1)
Unfortuneatly not. They were intended to be squishy lemmings after I got bored one night playing Lemmings 2: Tribes. I could kill many of them with grenades or rockets. But it was so slow, and so much effort!
I wanted a quick mass holocaust style death for those lemmings.
ps. I had no idea QBasic code was so portable ;) Thanks!
Re:it might not be so bad (Score:2)
I haven't coded in VB for ages, but the three I was thinking of were null, 0, and I think an empty string translates to null in some circumstances. So I guess there's more than 6 in an ambiguous sort of way. :)
===
Re:Briefing and DeBriefing (Score:1)
For lack of oxygen. As the distance from the earth to a given point in the atmosphere gets greater, the air becomes thinner; hence, the sky has more trouble breathing at those heights, bringing about the blue color.
It becomes black at night because there is no light with which to see the blue color.
Let's be consistent here, folks... (Score:3)
Come on... I'll never touch KBasic, but I think it's cool that it's being done.
In my opinion, the problems with VB viruses in Outlook, Word, Excel, et al are issues with Outlook, Word, Excel, et al, not VB. First off, there's nothing saying that apps need to support KBasic as a scripting language. Second, the apps themselves -- if written correctly -- should not allow the same idiocy that Outlook et al allowed from VB.
Besides, M$ didn't invent BASIC. They cloned it from another system (VMS? I can't remember).
So, like, chill dudes...
Re:whether or not you like this, its what Linux ne (Score:1)
Basic has a number of bad feature and I think we should let the pile of cruft died with windows.
This is what gives VB a bad name... (Score:2)
No problem. Have you thought of checking to see if the array is empty? Or raising an error in the function (seems like 0 elements would be an error condition in most cases). Or maybe using error handling...
Object-Orientation. Ever attempted type-safe inheritance or polymorphism in VB? Variants do not count.
There are some OO issues, but have you ever looked at the Implements keyword?
String Concatenation.
VB does do a poor job of string concatenation - but there are ways around that. The problem lies in the memory management involved in resizing the string. The solution is to create a fixed length string of desired size and then replace the contents of the string with your data.
That is a really sad statement. Maybe you should start trying to improve your skills and stop complaining. It is possible to write poor code in any language. Unfortunately, the ease of use of VB allows below average programmers to pass themselves off as lead developers when in fact they have a minimal grasp of the language. A good good developer needs to have a grasp of the the way the language operates. A good understanding and knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of any language is essential. If you don't have the patience to learn the language fully, perhaps you should switch to another language or stop calling yourself a programmer. VB has a bad reputation as it is, it doesn't any more below average programmers writing buggy apps...
Re:Translation issues... (Score:2)
I barely survived my basic knowledge (Score:1)
The only way I managed to learn C was by making a conscious effort to forget my basic knowledge.
The very fact that I had known basic before learning C made it take about 3 months longer to learn C than it really should have.
I code in Java and C++ at work now, and I'm a VERY strong believer in OOP.
Re:The best BASIC... (Score:2)
Allow me to introduce you to... fte [sourceforge.net]! (the Folding Text Editor). It has some other nice features too...
-Spiv.
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
Python is almost as bad as C?
I'd say Python is much more like BASIC than C - it has a very friendly syntax - and even an interactive mode!
>>> print "Hello World!"
Hello World!
>>> 6 * 9
54
I would think the code for a simple calculator would look very similar in BASIC and Python. And after writing it, you could save it in a module so you could go "import mycalc" later :)
-Spiv.
I guess I should have seen this one coming (Score:2)
The trouble with BASIC variants, including Visual BASIC and Dark BASIC and Power BASIC, is that the languages tend to grow in all directions at the same time, with whatever mish-mosh of features seem good at the moment. After a while, that's what drives people away from languages like this. You need to spend a good amount of time becoming a Visual BASIC expert, and it keeps getting more complex with each release. Eventually it's easier to go with a language with a slimmer core.
Re:What is wrong with this? (Score:2)
Are you using the same VB that I'm using?
-Spiv.
repeat after me... (Score:1)
Basic BAD, python GOOD.
Basic BAD, python GOOD.
Basic BAD, python GOOD.
There now, was that so bad? :-)
Seriously, I like the idea of having a good/great language with a kick-ass IDE. The danger is that a mediocre/bad language with a kick-ass IDE will survive because of the IDE. When the limitations of the programming language become a real problem, there will be too much time and effort invested in the project to back out. This is what happens with a lot of VB programmers; people I know who have used VB (I'm not one of them) hate it with a passion. A better approach is to develop the IDE around a good language like python (which I use all the time); everyone I know that knows python loves it, and it scales well with increasing project complexity.
Mike
GOTO? What's a GOTO? (Score:1)
So c'mon, BASIC haters, quit whining. Line-numbered, GOTO'd BASICs disappeared in the '80s. Those arguments against it disappeared years ago when GW-Basic/BasicA/Extended Color Basic died.
The only exception is HP/HT/Rocky Mountain BASIC (used for engineering test stations and the like), probably THE worst language ever produced by anybody. And, unfortunately, that one is still around.
---------------------------------------------
The end of that sig should read "If you are having problems with our products please go to Helen Waite." #$%& 120-character limit!
We don't need BASIC anymore (Score:1)
Re:Uh Oh (Score:3)
One of the reasons Windows spread to the desktop so well is because of its wealth of applications. The biggest cause of this wealth of applications was Visual Basic-- a language/IDE that would allow even the beginning programmer to create a useful application for the everyday Joe.
As a seasoned C++ programmer, I fully agree that any BASIC variation could never perform as well as its C++ counterpart. However, as a seasoned network administrator, I can also tell you the sole reason our corporation uses Windows is because one of the critical applications is a Windows only application. While C++ and most other languages provide better performance and control than BASIC variants, a good majority of applications in use dont require such performance and control-- and having a pool of programmers that is 10x as large to choose from usually makes for a better application in the end.
Re:Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! (Score:2)
Here, let me help you in your tasks.
This story is about KBasic, a RAD tool similar to Visual BASIC on Windows, but being developed for KDE on Linux.
My position is that if it is as similar to "Visual BASIC on Windows" as the rest of the K Desktop Environment is to the Windows Desktop Environment, then this would be a manifestly bad thing.
Got it?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
KDE and BASIC: A natural conclusion (Score:1)
BASIC??? (Score:5)
So, why do we need BASIC?
Re:Uh Oh (Score:1)
And it begins to sound less like BASIC, and more like Perl, and eventually more like C...
KBasic based on Dartmouth? (Score:1)
Re:Pretentious (Score:1)
Re:The best BASIC... (Score:2)
Or emacs' hideshow-mode.
Why not use Perl? (Score:2)
Perl is already a successful open-source scripting language, and there are loads and loads of modules built to do nearly anything most users would ever want to accomplish, or at least get you most of the way there. So why go a build a whole new langauge, when extremely competent ones already exist? I hate learning new languages all the time; some convergence could go a long way, I think.
A source code converter would be better. (Score:1)
It seems to me that Microsoft put efficient tools into Visual Basic because the company wants to make sure it doesn't deliver a good programming tool. It isn't Basic that people like, it is the tools available in VB.
Visual Basic is written in C and C++, I understand. Microsoft wants to make sure that its customers are not able to become good enough programmers to compete with its own products. That's why it delivers efficient tools for a ridiculously bad language.
Most people don't seem to realize that the limitations of Microsoft products are deliberate. Windows 98 crashes because there is a deliberate limitation (of 128 K memory, I understand) in GDI and User resources. Exceed those limitations, and the operating system crashes without warning. Deliberate limitations like this are the action of a monopoly wanting to insure that the customers always have a reason to upgrade.
(Run Microsoft's own Resource Meter software in Windows 98 to see the limitations in action.)
It is a challenge for open source software creators not to get involved with Microsoft's destructiveness. Possibly what is really needed here is converter to take source code from a VB program and turn it into source code in a sensible language.
If the conversion could go in both directions, the need to write in VB would completely disappear. This is the desired effect. The present plan, of providing a VB-like language in open source software has the negative effect of encouraging VB programming.
Why wait for Kbasic.. get RapidQ! (Score:1)
There's a package called 'RapidQ' that IMHO kicks *ss. The compiler is cross platform (Windoze,NT, Linux, Solaris, HPUX, etc..) and it can write almost everything from GUI to console to CGI. RapidQ also has the ability to build single executibles under windoze, which is a huge bonus.
There have been a lot of hybrid features added from C/C++, Perl, and Delphi implimented in RapidQ, which takes object oriented BASIC to a new level...
Check it out... I guarantee it's better than KBasic, plus it's been around a bit longer. Get RapidQ (it's freeware) [basicguru.com]
Regards
--cr@ckwhore
Re:basic can be very powerfull (Score:1)
Ummm (Score:1)
Re:Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it? (Score:1)
http://www.perlmonks.org [perlmonks.org].
Re:BASIC is a "nice" language for beginners ... (Score:1)
Re:Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it? (Score:2)
Bletch!
Perl has it's uses, but to learn programming with? If you want to teach bad habits, maybe...
Don't get me wrong, Perl is really handy sometimes, but I would strongly advise against teaching people to program with it. It encourages shortcuts that make things "easy" - which is fine if you know what you're doing. A Perl hacker knows what sort of magic is going on behind the scenes. A newbie programmer doesn't.
-Spiv.
Re:Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! (Score:1)
it doesn't look like winblows and crash less
often. I got a good laugh too when I read
about this KBasic. Basic much like Cobol
should not be used as it makes it impossible
for people to learn how to program.
Re:Why is the sky blue? (Score:1)
Please go to a science section in a book store and educate yourself.
Re:Excellent (Score:1)
program you must not let them do basic.
Do Fortran, Pascal, Delphi, C, perl
or C++.
that's cool, but... (Score:1)
But, I was pretty sure Basic was Microsoft's property. Isn't this going to run into some type of legal trouble if it resembles the M$ creation? They didn't even try to name it differently, so I think it's likely to be a close copy in context as well.
________
Re:Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it? (Score:1)
Re:Shortest article? (Score:1)
Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! (Score:2)
Please, NO ONE tell them where they can find already completed code or tools to quickly finish this project! Give us time to develop a decent language as a response...
The last thing we need is a custom Macro Virus Language for Linux...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:A source code converter would be better. (Score:2)
A difficult task, at least if you wish to make it platform independent at the same time. A lot of VB's "power" comes from it's ability to use COM stuff, which makes stuff like
Set xl = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
xl.visible = 1
possible (This pops up an Excel window, in case you couldn't guess).
But if you were prepared to shift languages but keep with win32 for simplicity's sake... I don't see any real barriers to mechanically converting VB to, say, Python. In fact, it should be dead easy - Python has all the features of VB, including COM support, plus ALOT more.
The trick would be converting it to efficient code, i.e. noticing certain idioms and converting them to Python equivalents - it'd make no sense to use the Scripting.Dictionary object in Python, for instance. The only feature of VB that I can't immediately think of a Python equivalent for is it's "With" statement... which would hardly be hard to cope with.
In fact, I'm half tempted... hmm... I just need to get some free time... [grumble grumble] Maybe someday. Or has someone already started doing this?
-Spiv.
Re:Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! (Score:1)
I thought it was called "Perl".
The right words (Score:2)
or, given the tenor of the response, "foolish".
Re:First QBasic Lemmings Screen Saver (Score:2)
*sigh*... here's a shorter one that is quite pretty. I should point out though that it was written by a friend of mine, not me. I'm typing this from memory, so mistakes are possible.
' VGA Spheres by Peter Aylettdefint a-z
screen 13
randomize timer
for a = 0 to 31
palette a, a*2
palette a, a*2*&h100
palette a, a*2*&h10000
next a
do until inkey$ <> ""
x = int(rnd()*320)
y = int(rnd()*200)
c = int(rnd()*3)*32
for r = 0 to 31
circle(x,y ),r,c+32-r
circle(x,y +1),r,c+32-r
next
loop
Re:First QBasic Lemmings Screen Saver (Score:1)
I could make *my* simple display hack a lot prettier, now! Thank your friend for me, and ask him where he was 10 years ago when I needed him!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Haven't they heard of C# yet? (Score:2)
Re:that's cool, but... (Score:2)
Visual Basic is Microsoft's - I'm sure they have a Trade Mark on that name. BASIC, though, is older than Microsoft (Microsoft's very first product was a version of BASIC). They didn't invent it.
-Spiv.
StarBasic? (Score:2)
--
Re:GOTO? What's a GOTO? (Score:2)
Not quite. Microsoft didn't create QuickBasic (or it's trimmed down cousin, QBasic). They bought it from another company.
-Spiv.
Re:BASIC is a "nice" language for beginners ... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, working through thousands of lines of code written in a language which makes the use of GOTO so painless, I've become a hardened cynic. It's not just the coders, but the ease with which those coders can effect an unconditional branch (guess where this comes from
Wait until we see a spec on this KBasic, whether GOTO is included.
To make Basic perfect one should:
Remove GOTO
Have Local variables
Execute fast
... Ah hell, I'll just stick with C
--
Chief Frog Inspector
Re:Excellent (Score:5)
No, it isn't.
Visual Basic is a very poor language. The form editor isn't bad, the Object Browser quite handy, the IDE is so-so, but the language is terrible. Here is some food for thought:
Arrays. Say you've got a function which returns an array of some sort - let's say an array of variants to make it easy. How do you return an array of 0 items cleanly?
Object-Orientation. Ever attempted type-safe inheritance or polymorphism in VB? Variants do not count.
String Concatenation. Say you have an HTML page being generated by an ActiveX component called from ASP in IIS (apologies for the MS jargon... this really happened at my workplace though). If you are generating a table, and it has, say 20 columns by 100 rows (or in our case, sometimes more), you naturally would simply generate a big string of the HTML and pass it back to the ASP to spit out, right? But in the process of generating those 2000 table cells, you do quite a few string concatenations. Here's the problem: VB's string concatenation is O(n^2)! (as according to MS, apparently, not to mention our own testing). It can take many seconds or even minutes to spit out something that should be done in a fraction of a second. In the end we wrote a "FastString" component in C++ and used that in the VB. It instantly brought one test case down from 8.5 minutes to 2.5 seconds. Not exactly what I'd call getting a "job done quickly".
So, the obvious question: What's the alternative that's so much better, huh? As a matter of fact, I do have one in mind: Python. It does everything VB does, and much much more. The language is a lot nicer than Visual Basic. *Especially* for beginners. The in-built types are just so much more powerful. Lists and dictionaries being integral parts of the language automatically makes those simple jobs much simpler. (Yes, I realise there is Scripting.Dictionary for VB, but it's not as convenient.)
More impressively, with Python you don't hit your head against a brick wall when you decide to attempt something larger than 50 lines - it's a language that scales well between beginners *and* experts.
If you're wondering, yes I do hate VB with a vengenance, and I code in it (almost) every day. I feel qualified to rant.
[breathes deeply]
Ahhh.... that's better.
-Spiv.
Not really true these days... (Score:3)
At the time Dijkstra wrote his observation BASIC didn't support user defined functions, used line numbers, and a whole lot of other ancient problems.
Visual BASIC today competes successfully against Java and has 2-3 times as many developers using it in complex projects well over 20 lines of code.
Re:BASIC??? (Score:2)
Heh... I remember being annoyed at GW-BASIC's RENUM command and thinking it was a tool for lesser coders who didn't plan ahead. Of course, I'm also pretty sure I actually stuck RENUM into one of my programs somewhere, so it reorganized itself during runtime...
The one thing you have to say about BASIC is that it was fun. I remember coding little games and stuff just for the fun of it. Then I went on to coding little games in C, and writing all sorts of other code in other buzzwordy languages. Yeah, it's enjoyable, but the thrill is gone most of the time.
Here's a thought. I, at least, remember the line-number BASICs with great fondness, and apparently so do a lot of us. Do you think that's because BASIC had some properties that made it fun to hack in (I do) or that it's just because most of us were pretty young when we did that and this is just your standard nostalgia?
Re:basic can be very powerfull (Score:2)
I bet you didn't know that VB is Turing-Complete, did you, huh? Or that at a fundamental level everything that can be done by VB can be done by any other Turing-Complete language? It seems to me that it is obvious that algorithms are possible in VB. Hell, they're possible in Intercal too, no doubt. It's Turing-Complete.
Try PostScript. Just because its a language for printers doesn't mean that is all it can do.
-Spiv.
PS - you seem to have problem with "prejiduce" and "loyalists", while keeping a closed mind yourself. Think of it this way: BASIC suits you, so you like it. That is fine, you are welcome to have that opinion. Why can't others believe that OO is possible or even easy to do in C, or that it may even be better to do in OO in C than C++? Just because you like BASIC, doesn't mean C is a bad choice of language for everyone else (and vice-versa, of course...).
Re:Excellent (Score:3)
As an aside, why did the parent message to this get moderated down?
Just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be moderated down! I disagreed with their opinion, too. But I'd rather see you say *why* you think someone is wrong, than simply say "You're wrong" - or even worse, say it by anonymously moderating them down.
-Spiv.
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
Perhaps. In some ways, Perl is like BASIC - it encourages bad habits. (That's about where the similarity stops though).
Of course, I may simply be scarred from having seen too much messy Perl code. It's certainly a powerful language, and I don't mind dabbling in it occasionally. But Python suits my style much better.
It's a personal thing. Which is why, of course, this discussion has become a language war, rather than a discussion of the topic in the story that was originally posted...
-Spiv.
why basic? (Score:2)
Re:Haven't they heard of C# yet? (Score:2)
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
Silly developer. Don't you know the fastest way to concat big strings in VB* is to write to a file and then slurp it back in? It only took me an hour to figure out this workaround the first time I came across this.
You gotta think out of the box. :)
Ah yes. MS came so close and yet so far.
(chuckle)
(*) Yes, I'm serious. For those big 1/2-100MB strings it's 100 times as fast. Literally 100.
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
Re:Not really true these days... (Score:2)
They've both been targetted towards RAD for database applications. As such they are good for retrieving data munching on it for a bit and then displaying it to the user to do something with.
However neither is going to be used to write a new Operating System with.
Part of the whole concept of
Re:First QBasic Lemmings Screen Saver (Score:2)
It turned out to be our CEO's birthday and there was a party, so I hacked together a little animation program:
1 OFF = RND(4) * 15
5 GOTO 10
8 FOR I = 8 TO 0 STEP -1
9 GOTO 20
10 FOR I = 0 TO 9
20 N = 10 - I
30 FOR J = 1 TO N+OFF: PRINT " ";: NEXT J
40 FOR J = 1 TO (I*2)+1: PRINT "*";: NEXT J
50 PRINT
60 NEXT I
70 IF I > 1 THEN GOTO 8
490 IF RND(691)<.5 THEN PRINT:PRINT:PRINT " HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIR!!!!":PRINT
494 C = RND(5) * 10
495 PRINT CHR$(150+C);
496 D = RND(6)*1000
497 FOR I=1 TO D:NEXT I
500 PRINT:PRINT:GOTO 1
It was very surreal to be coding BASIC on a C64 in the year 2000...
it might not be so bad (Score:2)
I almost never write anything in BASIC unless I'm forced to, but the only fundamental thing I really have against BASIC as a language is what MS Visual BASIC has turned it into.
If KBasic avoids the same trend and doesn't do everything possible to do what learner programmers mean at the expense of language integrity, it might not be so bad... and thankfully in an open source model, there's probably not much chance of this happening.
Come to think of it, as long as it doesn't end up with six different ways to specify NULL, I probably won't be too offended by it. (Off the top of my head I can only think of 3 in VB, but someone told me there were 6.)
===
Re:Not really true these days... (Score:2)
Yes, and I don't much like Java either. :-P
Certainly, having user-defined functions and ditching line-numbers have improved the language immensely. It's still crap though. I've personally written thousands of lines of VB. And for most it, it felt like I was wrestling against the limitations of it to try make it do something useful. It certainly has taken on aspects of other languages. The result is an ugly, cumbersome language with very big limitations.
-Spiv.
It's obvious (Score:3)
Isn't it obvious?
Language wars, of course! Just look at all the flamin^Wdiscussion it's generating!
-Spiv.
Re:Excellent (Score:3)
Glad to hear it!
I personally learnt Python from Programming Python, from ORA, which is a fairly good book, but I soon learnt that the Online Documentation [python.org] was invaluable. Especially the Library Reference.
For those who are interested, I have a small python cgi here [usyd.edu.au] . Just to pretend this is on-topic... "I'd hate to write even that in VB". :)
-Spiv.
The best BASIC... (Score:2)
... still has to be GFA BASIC. Such a joy to program in, even compared to modern languages, and it had a decent syntax and a full set of control structures. And I so miss the feature that allowed you to collapse an entire function into a single line in the editor...
But yeah, the point is that pretty much any procedural language can take on whatever aspects of others it wishes. Sure BASIC uses a "novice" syntax, but that's no reason why there shouldn't be an implementation that successfully integrates object orientation and other features found in C++, Delphi or Java.
Unfortunately, VB is only partly there, and a bit of a mess to boot. But there's nothing to stop KBASIC from conquering these problems and producing a clean, useful implementation of the language which can be used for modern, large projects by both people with little programming experiance and those that have been coding for years.
BASIC is not the problem, it's implementations are.
Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it? (Score:3)
Knowing Perl, C, C++ or the language du jour only makes you a well payed trained monkey. Understanding algorithms and how they effect efficiency is a lot more important. This can be gleaned using any language, BASIC had the advantage that it was simple to use, you didn't need to worry about syntax or memory allocation or pointers.
Maybe spending effort on a modern BASIC is misguided, but to bitch and moan about the language many geeks learned from is inane. I've thought for a while that PERL was the BASIC of the present era, I think its shameful that it's not included on every machine shipped, much like BASIC was not too long ago.
Having a BASIC or PERL that could do native GUI stuff on whatever box it exists on would be a great thing if it was shipped on every box regardless of OS. It'd get more people actually interested in computer science at an early age rather than the current state where most people seem to be in it for the money and have little or any talent.
What is wrong with this? (Score:2)
Re:This is what gives VB a bad name... (Score:2)
I don't think 0 items is always necessarily an error condition - there are times when it's perfectly valid to have nothing in a list or whatever
And just how do you intend to check if the array is empty, hmm? Seriously. Show me the code you have in mind. Here is the function prototype:
Function Foo() As Variant()
Show me both how to return an empty array, and also how to test for it.
After doing that, tell me how long it took you to figure out. I'd be interested to know.
Yes, but that's tricky to do cleanly when you don't know the size of your string until you've created it... and the point is it shouldn't be difficult in the first place in such a high-level language!
And as for your opinion me as a coder, without having seen any of my code... I much don't care. It is certainly possible to write poor code in any language, but I'd like to think that I write reasonably good code, and my friends and co-workers (who have seen my code) generally agree (at least do to my face... :-).
I have put a reasonable effort into learning VB, and how to use it most effectively. And if the flaws I've cited above were the only flaws, then it'd probably be okay, but I find the whole language has problems. Those are just a sample of the things which bug me.
-Spiv.
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
I happen to like the indentation of Python. I find it's only rarely inconvenient. Much less than people tend to think.
Any decent editor can cope with indenting and outdenting large blocks of code easily, which pretty much makes the "correct number of tabs" thing a non-issue. Or by "tty mode" did you mean pasting directly into the interpreter? What an odd thing to be doing with large sections of code.
-Spiv.
Re:GOTO? What's a GOTO? (Score:2)
Are you sure?
I could've *sworn* I saw the copyright to another company in QuickBasic. I'll admit I didn't check, just relying upon memory, so I could be wrong.
Oh well. It happens. Apologies for the mis-information.
-Spiv.
Re:Excellent (Score:3)
Ouch! They must have worked very hard at Redmond to make it *that* bad, given that the obvious string concat implementation is O(n). That would make naive concatentation of N strings K characters each O(K N^3).
But that is a language implementation problem. Not a language problem per se. Nothing's to stop the KBasic team from doing better. They could do a lot better, actually: with a little thought and a little exponential overallocation in the string implementation, naive concatenation of N K-character strings would be only O(K N lg(K N)).
/A
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
No, the fastest way is to use a COM component written in C that does it for you :)... we found that a speedup of 200 times was trivial to achieve (talking approx. 1.5Mb files here).
And I shudder to think of a webserver serving 100s of users at once having VB component spew files everywhere and read them back in... ugh!
-Spiv.
Re:BASIC??? (Score:2)
"YOU COULD BUY ME HERE, BUT WHY PAY $300 MORE?"
The message always lasted longer if it didn't catch the attention of the sales staff.
Re:it might not be so bad (Score:2)
Ah, yes, of course, thank you!
I knew it was something like that, but I kept thinking along the lines of a function like IsEmpty(), IsNull() and IsMissing(), but of course, Nothing being an object (or lack of, anyway) is treated slightly differently. And of course searching the MSDN for "IsNothing" didn't help...
As has been mentioned somewhere else in this discussion, there are just too many kinds of null (or whatever you want to call it) in VB. Especially as it treating an "empty" variant as an integer makes it magically seem to be 0, but treating it like a string makes it magically seem to be "".
Thanks again.
-Spiv.
Re:whether or not you like this, its what Linux ne (Score:2)
Though there can be no doubt that basic has many shortcoming compared to eg C and C++, it still doesn't mean that it could be the right tool for som developer for some jobs.
An easy language, and a good graphical developmnet environment will encourage development of small programs that scratch the itch of the average user.
Back in older times when my dad bought our first computer (commodore vic 20) I started doing Basic. This continued on the commodore 64, and on our first PC it was gwbasic.
Then I accidently stumbled accros turbo pascal 5. I tried to take a program I made in gwbasic and converted it to pascal (thank god for the excellent help function in turbo pascal), and I discovered that it ran many times as fast on pascal.
Well perhaps others will try the same. Writing
10 print "Hello world "
20 goto 10
is sure an easy concept to begin with.
Besides that for many apps it isn't necessary to have the code highly optimized.
Re:it might not be so bad (Score:2)
3 types of NULL? Hmm..
I can think of four: "Nothing", "Null", "Empty" and "Missing". Oh, and if you declare a variant array like this:
Dim fred() as Variant
but never ReDim it, then IsArray(fred) will be True, but both UBound and LBound choke on it. That sorta counts in a bizarre sort of way.
Btw, does anyone know a better way to detect if something is set to "Nothing" other than if typename(foo) = "Nothing" then ..., or catching errors?
-Spiv.
Re:First QBasic Lemmings Screen Saver (Score:2)
Yes, it had a Palette command that was incredibly slow... you were much better off using:
outp &h3c8, r
outp &h3c8, g
outp &h3c8, b
outp &h3c9, index
(I think... it's been a while)
Incidentally, QBasic did have a logical and, but I didn't use it in that program... you're probably confusing the notation for hex with that. The and operator was simply "And", IIRC.
-Spiv.
Core libraries should be shared with Gnome Basic (Score:3)
Now, before everyone starts screaming about viruses and the need for this, let me add another thought. At least for Gnome Basic, Michael Meeks was very conscientious about making gb have a secure sandbox from which an evil virus could not escape. The worst thing that can happen right now is DoS RAM consumption.
Also, there is an actual need for Basic in both Gnome and KDE. If we are going to capture any portion of the business users, Open Source must offer spreadsheets and word processors which are compatible with Micro$oft Basic. A large number of companies have huge collections of pre-existing documents which *must* work correctly or they will never even consider switching to Linux/BSD. Gnome Office and K Office must provide this capability before they can make serious inroads in the corporate world.
Linux Hypocrites (Score:3)
To all of you Linux Hypocrites out there who are spitting on a legitimate GNU/Free Software project, I have a few words for you. KBasic could, in fact catapult Linux onto many corporate desktops almost overnight, I would like to remind all of you that if it were not for the toolset M$ provides to actually code something for the Windows platform, I don't think that corporate America would have remained stuck in Windows for so long.
Certainly Visual Basic is is one of those tools. The bottom line in corporate America is that a button is a button and a combo box is a combo box, and a text box is a text box. Corporate America wants tools that are easy to use so they can:
1) connect to their databases
2) put stuff into them, pull stuff out of them,
3)and maybe show the user a little something along the way.
It seems like the KBasic team has the vision thing and all of you who posted negatively about a VB or Basic clone, will be kissing their feet in a few years.
Once again, good luck to the KBasic team.
Re:BASIC is a "nice" language for beginners ... (Score:2)
In later future it will also
See? They already prepare for irrational flow.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
Probably too late to be noticed... (Score:2)
Forget the language - it's the IDE that I want.
This is probably the ONLY thing M$ has done right - an IDE that has a "forms" editor (to lay out your windows), an attribute settings editor (to modify controls), code editing windows (intrinsically tied to the controls*), and controls to drop on the form, to build the forms easily.
I don't know of any comparable system for Linux (now, I know I am showing my lack of Linux knowledge here - I am sure there are good IDEs, and code editors, and maybe even form layout editors for X - who knows? - I just haven't gotten to the point of investigating about them yet). I know there is some similar things for Java...
After I learned C/C++ (stronger in C than C++ - yes, amazingly I am a coder who knows about both!), I realized that what I wanted was the ability to have an IDE like VB's, but the ability to write the "glue" code in C/C++ (and glue code is what most of VB is - it is almost possible to build an app in VB, that does useful work, without writing a line of code - that isn't to say it will be a perfect app - nay, one needs to add code to add exception handling, so that one doesn't screw up a DB table or something). Such a beast has yet to appear - the closest I have seen has been some of the Java IDEs.
If this could be done - if the Linux dev community can see past it's arrogance (yes, VB is limiting in some respects, but it is also very powerful - if only in the RAD arena alone - once you know how to leverage it, it can be great for many types of applications - Quake clone? Unlikely - Frontend for data visualization - Done every day), they would realize the importance of the IDE, and not of the language (this also assumes the IDE will be extractable from the rest of the code).
(*) - This is one of the powers of the VB IDE above VisualC (and the few other IDEs for other languages/platforms). With VisualC, one must build the form(s), then build the code, then do a wierd "hooking" process to "attach" the code to the various events that the form sends out, so that when an event occurs, the code is executed (and overrides a default action). Then the programmer can compile and link the app to form an executable. I like the way VB does this - just double-click the control, select the event procedure to override, and code - then compile to "test" the app. A real RAD tool...
I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
Re:Ever heard of MFC wizard? (Score:2)
Might have to investigate it further (though I am doing less and less on my doze box as time goes by - been having a real fun time lately patching my kernel to 2.2.14 to get my Zip drive working properly)...
I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
Wheel? Sounds like a good idea, let's invent it! (Score:2)
Anyways, of course they have a right to do whatever they want with their free time, but I hope that all the designers are aware of the great choices out there.
Really, the key to Visual Basic is that you can easily add a new widget (component, VBX, whatever) and have it integrate smoothly into the designer. Without that feature, these GUI designers are really just going to be toys, sadly.
--JRZ
Re:First QBasic Lemmings Screen Saver (Score:2)
' QBasic Lemmings screen saver version 1.1 for slashdot.
' -- fixed stupid greater/less than signs in code
SCREEN 13
LOCATE 8, 3: PRINT "10 Million Lemmings Can't be Wrong"
LOCATE 10, 15: PRINT "contact"
COLOR 7: LOCATE 14, 9: PRINT "tomtomdrum@yahoo.com"
COLOR 8: LOCATE 22, 23: PRINT "<ESC> to quit": SLEEP 5
' OPTIONS MENU (well maybe)
gravity =
chanceoffalling = 30 'the random odds of starting to fall, it gives a tricle effect to the jumping, the odds of falling are 1/chanceoffalling
nooflemmings = 50 'the number of lemmings on the screen at one time
SCREEN 12 'the screen mode
mx = 640 'the X axis res for the screen mode
my = 480 'the Y axis res for the screen mode
wobble = 3 'the wobble on the lemmings (left & right) as they fall, it is +- wobble each side in pixels
bloodcolour = 4 'the colour of the lemming mush
bloodrange = 5 'the amount lemming mush width to be left when a lemming dies. in a pyramid shape
' END OF (GA?) MENU
' MAIN PROGRAM
RANDOMIZE TIMER
DIM a(nooflemmings, 1, 1), b(mx)
FOR i = 1 TO nooflemmings
a(i, 0, 0) = INT(RND * mx) + 1
a(i, 1, 0) = -5
NEXT i
1
FOR i = 1 TO nooflemmings
CIRCLE (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0)), 3, 2
PAINT (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0)), 0, 2
CIRCLE (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0)), 3, 0
CIRCLE (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0) - 4), 1, 0
PSET (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0) - 4), 0
LINE (a(i, 0, 0) - 2, a(i, 1, 0) + 4)-(a(i, 0, 0) + 2, a(i, 1, 0) + 4), 0
PSET (a(i, 0, 0) - 3, a(i, 1, 0) + 1), 0
PSET (a(i, 0, 0) + 3, a(i, 1, 0) + 1), 0
IF INT(RND * chanceoffalling) + 1 = 1 AND a(i, 1, 0) = -5 THEN a(i, 1, 0) = 20
IF a(i, 0, 0) < 1 THEN a(i, 0, 0) = a(i, 0, 0) + mx
IF a(i, 0, 0) > mx THEN a(i, 0, 0) = a(i, 0, 0) - mx
IF a(i, 1, 0) > b(a(i, 0, 0) + d) + my AND a(i, 0, 0) > bloodrange AND a(i, 0, 0) < mx - bloodrange THEN
numberofdead = numberofdead + 1
FOR c = -bloodrange TO bloodrange
'SOUND 50 + bloodrange + c,
b(a(i, 0, 0) + c) = b(a(i, 0, 0) + c) - (bloodrange - SQR(c ^ 2))
LINE (a(i, 0, 0) + c, b(a(i, 0, 0) + c) + my)-(a(i, 0, 0) + c, my), bloodcolour
NEXT c
a(i, 1, 0) = -5
a(i, 1, 1) = 0
a(i, 0, 0) = INT(RND * mx)
END IF
IF a(i, 1, 0) > 0 THEN a(i, 1, 1) = a(i, 1, 1) + gravity
a(i, 1, 0) = a(i, 1, 0) + a(i, 1, 1)
a(i, 0, 0) = a(i, 0, 0) + INT(RND * (wobble * 2)) - wobble
CIRCLE (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0)), 3, 1
PAINT (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0)), 11, 1
CIRCLE (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0) - 4), 1, 12
PSET (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0) - 4), 14
LINE (a(i, 0, 0) - 2, a(i, 1, 0) + 4)-(a(i, 0, 0) + 2, a(i, 1, 0) + 4), 12
PSET (a(i, 0, 0), a(i, 1, 0) + 4), 0
PSET (a(i, 0, 0) - 3, a(i, 1, 0) + 1), 12
PSET (a(i, 0, 0) + 3, a(i, 1, 0) + 1), 12
NEXT i
'UPDATE NO'OF DEAD LEMMINGS
LOCATE 1, 1: COLOR 15: PRINT "Number of lemmings have killed while running this program:"; numberofdead
LOCATE 1, 20: COLOR 7: PRINT "you"
'i'm allowed to use a GOTO... er, try and stop me!
IF INKEY$ <> CHR$(27) THEN GOTO 1
'end credits
CLS
PRINT "Released under the GPL"
PRINT
PRINT
LOCATE 15, 1
PRINT "press any to key to resume reality..."
COLOR 0
END
Do not download! KBasic supports the bourgeoisie! (Score:5)
The member list [kbasic.de]. Read down at the bottom, at the "Additional thanks to" section. Or rather read the BLANK space there.
Yes my fellow working class GNULIX user, those bastard capitalists programmers list only themselves as creating KBasic. I ask you - should not the man who created thier keyboards be listed too? Or the workers at the powerplant who provide the electricity needed for them to program? Or even Ivan who runs the breadstore down the road for providing nourishment to the programmers?
I also see they have released this software under the GPL. Blasphemy! Marx is spinning in his grave at this. How can the bourgeoisie release such foul capitalist inspired code under the sacred socialist liscence - the GPL?
Yes my fellow men, abandon KBasic as you would abandon your class in society. As you would embrace Lenin, embrace the One True BASIC - GWBASIC!
Thank you.
With love,
Re:Excellent (Score:2)
Just to clarify, by parent I mean the message with cid=21. Apologies for the ambiguity.
-Spiv.
Re:The best BASIC... (Score:2)
Agreed (good old Atari ST...
Their (yuck!) Win32 port closely resembles a (yuck!!!) VB clone, but at least it works in wine.
the point is that pretty much any procedural language can take on whatever aspects of others it wishes
without remaining compatible, though, unfortunately. More fragmentation in programming languages ("this program requires xyz's implementation of the abc compiler, version 1.23.45") is just what we need (not).
Still, KBasic is probably a good idea - it will make it much easier for VB programmers to port their stuff to real OSes.
Nobody needs basic any more (Score:2)
a) Those who write or maintain Windows gui/components/ASP
b) Those without the balls to learn Java
If they wanted to do something useful, they would write a Java IDE. But that has already been done by Forte/Sun. It seems all KDE wants to do is make linux into a Windows clone, or create a sandbox for newbies.
Now I'm not criticising basic. It had its day a couple of years back in Office 97 and VB5, but you have to move with the times and cross platform, OO is the way forward.
Re:Geeks who cut their teeth on it malign it? (Score:2)
Re:Nobody needs basic any more (Score:2)
a) Those who write or maintain Windows gui/components/ASP
They're all potential users of real OSes who just haven't used them yet.
Actually I know some people who match this description and who would move to a real OS if they didn't have to rewrite all their stuff in a totally different language.
Rewriting 20000 lines of BASIC code in C, C++ or Java is not exactly a fast or interesting job.
b) Those without the balls to learn Java
While there's no really working free JDK (kaffe still isn't there, probably some time in the future...), there are other reasons not to do Java.
If they wanted to do something useful, they would write a Java IDE
Plus a free JVM and JDK... Without these, a Java IDE is pretty much useless.
It seems all KDE wants to do is make linux into a Windows clone
No way. KDE doesn't have a bluescreen module, a "send-everything-to-microsoft"-feature (aka windowsupdate.microsoft.com), useless drive letters,
KDE is just trying to make the transition from a broken OS to a real OS as easy as possible, which is a good thing.
Basic is definitely not the greatest programming languages, but basic variants are still quite easy to get for people who haven't done programming before (and who don't want to be serious programmers).
posers (Score:2)
WTF?
They admit they are lame like that? That's a little too open.
(not an insult)
portentious?
--
Finally.... (Score:2)
Translation issues... (Score:4)
Here's definition number one of pretentious from dictionary.com: "Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified."
So I can easily see how this might be mistaken for "difficult" or "involved" by a non native speaker. Especially given the, ahem, high quality of cross-language dictionaries in the world.
--
Re:Not really true these days... (Score:2)
Well, it's an order of magnitude better than VB...
I've got a few specific things I don't like about Java. It borrows heavily from C syntax, yet somehow loses alot of the terseness - which seems like the worst of both worlds. It's doesn't have templates, which severely limits it as well, IMHO.
But mainly, I just don't like the *feel* of the language. I don't enjoy programming in it, so I don't use it. It's certainly a personal thing. I do like that it has a large standard library (although some parts aren't particularly pretty). And it has other things going for it (like JPython :-), but overall, it's not my thing.
Flame away :)
-Spiv.
whether or not you like this, its what Linux needs (Score:4)
GNOME Basic (Score:3)
http://www.gnome.org:65348/gb/
On the plus side, contemporary Linux developers will garner some hard-core experience dealing with the wickedness that comes with churing out your own language. I have already taken Theory of Automata and Compiler Theory and found that more than a little challenging. I think it will be a good warm-up for something better.
VB on linux and Linux in VC++ (Score:2)
Pretentious (Score:2)
A VB like IDE/Language may very well be pretentious.