ANSI INCITS 113-1987 (R2003) Full BASIC compliant compilers and interpreters

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 02:51:59

Here is a question for all providers of various versions of the BASIC
language.

I am interested in BASIC compilers and interpreters that conform to the ANSI
INCITS 113-1987 (R2003) and ISO/IEC 10279:1991 standard for Full BASIC. I’m
most interested in multiple OS platform examples.

My question is what BASICs are ANSI INCITS 113-1987 (R2003) and/or ISO/IEC
10279:1991 conformant?

Specifically I would like to know about:

RealBasic http://ww.realsoftware.com
Future Basic http://www.stazsoftware.com/futurebasic/index.php
Liberty Basic http://www.libertybasic.com
Just Basic http://www.justbasic.com
PureBasic http://www.purebasic.com/
Power Basic http://www.powerbasic.com
True Basic http://www.truebasic.com/
MS Visual Basic http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/
MS QBasic http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/msdos/comm6.mspx
MS QuickBasic http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q39730/
MS PDS http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q45167/
Dark Basic http://darkbasic.thegamecreators.com/
FreeBasic http://www.freebasic.net/index.php/about
Chipmonk Basic http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
Small Basic http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net/
XBasic http://www.xbasic.org/
KBasic http://www.kbasic.com/
UBasic
http://archives.math.utk.edu/software/msdos/number.theory/ubasic/.html
Decimal Basic http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/

and any others I forgot to mention. The Decimal basic people are the only
ones who claim some Full Basic compliance.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

John Fredrickson
Washington, DC, USA

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 02:54:46

Here is a question for all providers of various versions of the BASIC
language.

My question is what BASICs are ANSI INCITS 113-1987 (R2003) and/or ISO/IEC
10279:1991 conformant?

Specifically I would like to know about:

and any others I forgot to mention. The Decimal basic people are the only
ones who claim some Full Basic compliance.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

John Fredrickson
Washington, DC, USA

  Tom lake 2006-12-15 02:57:45

AFAIK no commercial version of BASIC has ever encompassed the entire
standard. I have the specs and have been trying for years to find a
compiler
that I could validate. The only one that even comes close (and it does come
really close) is True BASIC. I was a beta tester for a BASIC that was
supposed to be submitted for validation (NKR BASIC) but they seem to
have gone out of business. So right now, if you want to get over 99% of
the standard (the other BASICs you mention only come to about 65% – 75%
or so) True BASIC is your best bet. I have heard that they used to sell a
Unix compiler that met the criteria for the full standard but have never
seen
it for sale.

http://www.truebasic.com/

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-15 03:00:37

I read somewhere that the authors of Bywater claimed they were
trying for ANSI compliance, but I don’t think they finished and haven’t
seen any work on that OSS project in over a decade.

I know Chipmunk Basic is not compliant with the Full standard, but
I did change some stuff to help match it up with the Minimal Basic ISO
standard.

One of the True Basic authors was reportedly on one of the standards
commitees, so that’s one implementation at which you might look.
Microsoft reportedly walked out of the Full Standard commitee
meetings due to lack of “cooperation” with their goals as the nearly
defacto (non)standard at that point in time.

IIRC, some of the ANSI/ISO Basic Language standards were on the
obsolete list. Anyone know the current status?

IMHO. YMMV.
—
Ron N.
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic

  Michael mattia 2006-12-15 03:03:43

….

For the most part, newsgroups are not monitored by publishers

You would get more – and more accurate – responses contacting those
publishers directly.

MCM

  Steelweaver52 2006-12-15 03:06:30

Whether a particular BASIC language is compliant or not, is not that
interesting to me.

What I find fascinating, however, is that a standards committee has
created a specification guiding the creation of a product…for which
there are no real or potential customers. At least, there are very few
potential customers, Mr. Fredrickson being one of course.

Imagine me gathering a group of “experts” together, and writing a
specification for a waffle syrup that tastes like brussel sprouts. The
committee members and I would probably congratulate ourselves, and put
our efforts on the committee at the top of our resumes! Later, we
might be shocked, shocked I say, to find out that no syrup manufacturer
is interested in producing the product that we so carefully specified.

I’m not sure exactly where I am going with this, except to point out
the irony. Sometimes WE think our labors are important…but we may be
the only ones who do.

—Tom Nally, New Orleans

  Mark odwyer 2006-12-15 03:09:02

ROFLMAO!!!

Outstanding Tom… I needed that!
God… my sides still hurt…

– Mark

odwyervisuals@c**.net

  Anoneds@netsca 2006-12-15 03:14:40

Don’t forget the need to charge for copies of the document as well…
their work is that important – to them.

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 03:17:19

Minimal Basic is considered obsolete and replaced by Full Basic.

John Fredrickson

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-15 03:20:15

I wonder why this matters. The defacto standard is VBScript which
comes installed on well over 80% of all user programmable computer
(hidden inside Internet Exploder). The beginning non-CS-type
programmers are more likely to use something like javascript, python,
or perl for all purpose symbolic programming.

Basic users don’t code to an abstract standard and then go shopping
with their portable code for a vendor (given there is only one minor
vendor even close, thus rendering portability a non-issue). Random
Basic code found on the net is most likely to run under qbasic, or
even msbasic 1.0 with line numbers.

Minimal Basic might be the obsolete standard, but it seems to represent
the subset of the language which is actually most portable among the
greatest number of currently runnable implementations, much more
so than the Full Basic “standard”.

The Basic Standards committee failed to achieve any practical goal.
They started way too late. Given their late start, they
might well have been better off documenting the less ugly portions
of MS Street Basic. Doubtful that MS would have stayed fully
compliant, but other vendors might have provided something which
allowed more (if not perfect) portability than exists today, and
kept the BASIC language more alive.

IMHO. YMMV.
—
Ron N.
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 03:23:37

Ron, et al.,

The ultimate goal of a standard is to allow code to:

(1) be transportable from one operating system to another, for example from
Windows to Linux, BSD, and Mac OS/X. There are some vendors who are making
good progress in this endeavor, e.g. Real Software’s Realbasic; and

(2) work with multiple compilers and IDEs. I download code from the web and
try them with various compilers and interpreters and get errors all the
time. For example, some compilers/interpreters support many different data
types, others just support two: string and floating point.

It may well be the case that the current ANSI and ISO standards were too
little too late. They are oriented towards a sequentially executed (as
opposed to event driven), console-based, structured BASIC originally
conceived on time-sharing computers (like VAX/VMS BASIC).

We can just pay our money to Microsoft and go with the monopoly. Or we can
choose to participate in the standards making process and develop a newer
more modern standard for event-driven GUI-OSes. That way code developed in
True Basic, Real basic, Liberty Basic, PowerBasic, etc. are compatible.
Ultimately the beneficiaries are those who purchase compilers and develop
code.

John Fredrickson

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-15 03:26:42

Well, some of the OSS/Freeware Basic’s will build for multiple OS
hosts. YABasic can be built for Wintel and linux. I have on my site
GUI ports of Chipmunk Basic for Mac OS 9, OS X, and text-mode only
releases for Mac OS X (essentially BSD), linux/x86 and Wintel, plus
two smaller versions of the language for PalmOS. Let’s me transport
*my* Basic programs to 4 or 5 different OS platforms.
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic
http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/palm

I did some work on making Chipmunk Basic a close superset of the
Minimal Standard, but never finished going thru the Full Standard
as I have no Basic source code requiring that.

The cBasPad Basic interpreter started out being shoehorned into
less than a dozen K of memory on early PalmPilots, which gives
me an good appreciation why many early implementers made some
ugly shortcuts in language design and implementation.

IMHO. YMMV.
—
Ron N.

  Tom lake 2006-12-15 03:29:14

Are there any plans to:

1. Add graphics to the Win version of Chipmunk
2. Fix HotPaw’s bugs (especially on PalmOS 5.x)
or port it to WM 5?

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-15 03:31:29

I know nothing about Window GUI development. I’ve been looking
for a portable GUI that can be built on a Mac and driven from
sockets or pipes or something, which is how I’m adding graphics
to my linux/X11 ports of Chipmunk Basic.

Are there any standard graphics commands in the ANSI/ISO Full Standard?

Please report any Basic language related bugs. New OS or
platform related problems on new PalmOS units, especially
on units which I don’t have, are hard for me to reproduce.

I know nothing about WM development. (currently 🙂
Isn’t there already a Basic interpreter ported to WM?

IMHO. YMMV.
—
rhn A.T nicholson d.O.t C-o-M

  Tom lake 2006-12-15 03:35:48

Yes. They’re all spelled out in the standards document or you
can buy any version of True BASIC to see what they are.
www.truebasic.com

They’ve been reported in the Yahoo group, cbaspadandhotpawbasic for a long
time now.
I’ll post them again if you’d like.

Tom Lake

  Carlg 2006-12-15 03:38:28

Liberty BASIC isn’t designed to be compatible with the ANSI standard.
If anything it has crept a little closer to QBasic over the years
because that seems to be a defacto standard for BASIC.

Standards aside, Liberty BASIC 5 will run on Windows, Mac OS X, and
Linux, and we already have a new compiler and execution engine that
runs on all three. Unless you’re making OS calls the code you write on
one will run on the others without change. We will support GUI
development and straight console programming and stdio. Future
versions of Just BASIC will be based on this so it will also be cross
platform.

-Carl Gundel, author of Liberty BASIC and Just BASIC
http://www.libertybasic.com
http://www.justbasic.com

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 03:41:29

Carl,

You and I corresponded privately about your plans to make Liberty Basic and
Just Basic cross-platform soon. Are you willing to make a public anouncement
here about the time-frame and availability of these new engines?

John Fredrickson

  News 2006-12-15 03:44:19

I guess for completeness I should mention BBC BASIC. That, too, isn’t
ANSI compatible but it has been around for nearly 25 years and is an
established standard in its own right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_BASIC

BBC BASIC has been implemented on seven different CPUs and over twenty
platforms. The Open Source version of BBC BASIC (Brandy) runs under
RISC OS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Amiga OS and
MS-DOS. For a full list of BBC BASIC versions see:

http://www.mdfsnet.f9.co.uk/Software/BBCBasic/

Richard.
Author of BBC BASIC for Windows
http://www.rtrussell.co.uk/

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 03:47:46

Guys,

In the course of this discussion and some private investigations I have so
far established the following regarding cross-platform compatibility:

BBC BASIC has the most trans-platform support for some 30+ platforms;
Chipmunk Basic supports 4 platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, and
PalmOS;
RealBASIC supports 3 platforms: MAC OS/X, Windows, and Linux;
FreeBasic also supports 3 platforms: DOS, Linux, and Windows;
TrueBasic supports Mac OS9 and Windows with plans to someday support Mac
OS/X;
PowerBasic supports DOS and Windows and has no plans to support the Mac
or Linux at this time;
Kbasic supports Windows and Linux and plan to support Mac OS/X;
LibertyBasic and JustBasic support Windows but plans to support Linux
amd Mac OS/X;
QBASIC and QuickBasic run in a DOS environment;
Visual BASIC run on Windows.

This addresses the issue of a single compiler/interpreter implementation
being able to transport code between OS platforms.

What it does not address is the need to transport application code between
different manufacture’s products. At best, each product has varying degrees
of compatibility to Microsoft BASICA, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC, QBASIC, and
Visual Basic with differing features regarding graphics.

This leaves programmers with the age-old problem of a theoretical standard
versus a practical implementation. We have to choose a vendor and it’s
products and stick with it.

I welcome your comments.

John Fredrickson

  Tom lake 2006-12-15 03:49:51

We have an international standard already (ANSI 113-1987).
Why not design to that? Yes, some people would have to relearn
a few things but that’s true no matter which way we went.
True BASIC source code runs on IBM, older Apple (not OSX yet)
Amiga, Atari ST. Work is being done on a Linux version. There’s
no reason it couldn’t run on any platform after a suitable runtime is

would run identically between platforms (except, of course, for differences
in objects between OSes.) The ANSI standard is also supported by
Tom Kurtz, one of the inventors of the BASIC language. The late
John Kemeny, the co-inventor also supported it. True BASIC, Inc.
seems to be dropping the ball on keeping their version current so it
would be great to keep a user-supported effort going. I’ve met a lot
of people who are really against TB but I can convert most of them
when I ask them to give me a program in their favorite dialect and then
show them an equivqalent program in TB (and by default, ANSI).

Tom Lake

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 03:52:55

Tom,

I agree with you. That was the point of my original post. The various
providers of BASIC compilers and interpreters should support the ANSI/ISO
standard for Full Basic. We should continue the standardization process to
incorporate useful proprietary extensions to the language.

John Fredrickson

  Tom lake 2006-12-15 03:55:38

As for cross-platform support, ANY compiler or interpreter can be made to
run on any given platform. To those who argue that compiler X is great
because
it runs on more platforms than any other, I say it doesn’t matter. We can
make
ours run on those platforms, too if there’s enough interest. I see three
OSes
as being critical to support: Win, Linux and OSX (possible easier now that
we’ll have Intel Macs)

Tom Lake

  Carlg 2006-12-15 03:58:34

I really can’t set a date yet, sorry. We are making good progress, but
it will be a few months before we’ll be ready to have a testable
version.

-Carl Gundel
http://www.libertybasic.com

  News@rtrussell 2006-12-15 04:01:06

I think that’s a fair point for those implementations that have come
along *since* the standard was published, but for those that predate it
(like BBC BASIC) it’s hardly reasonable to expect them to
retrospectively incorporate ANSI/ISO compatibility.

Richard.
http://www.rtrussell.co.uk/
To reply by email change ‘news’ to my forename.

  Carlg 2006-12-15 04:03:50

I’m not sure that I agree with the use of the word “should” in this
context. I get very few requests to implement ANSI compliance. BASIC
has a culture of diversity dating back decades and it is more of a
strength than a weakness IMHO.

-Carl Gundel, author of Liberty BASIC
http://www.libertybasic.com

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 04:08:28

Guys,

Thank you all for answering this post, especially Ron, Tom, Michael, and
Carl. Your input is most appreciated. This has been one of the better
intellectual discussions I’ve seen in the BASIC newsgroups. I’m glad that
there are still people out there who care about BASIC, as I do.

Regards,

John Fredrickson

  Norman l. defo 2006-12-15 04:11:07

[snip]

How much does it cost to get a copy of that standard?

How much does it cost to get a compiler/interpreter certified as meeting
that standard?

If someone is developing a compiler/interpreter to be released as
*freeware*, how do they recoup the costs of getting the standard and
the certification (if they can even afford them in the first place)?

(The last time I enquired about obtaining a copy of any ANSI standard,
I was quoted a dollar figure with three or four digits to the left of
the decimal point. (And DEC wants $300 for a copy of the VT100
standard. If I wanted to write something that supported VT100, VT102,
VT52 and the ANSI terminal standards, the cost of the specifications
alone would bankrupt me.))

—
Norman De Forest http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/Profile.html
af380@chebucto.ns.ca [=||=] (At the Sign of the Flashing Cursor)
“Oh how I miss the days when it was easier to catch gonorhea than a
computer virus.” — Big Will in alt.comp.virus, March 9, 2005

  John fredricks 2006-12-15 04:13:55

Norman,

The cost of the ANSI standard Full Basic document on their web site
http://www.ansi.org is $30. I beleive the ISO standard document is $90.93.

The only two Windows compilers that approach ANSI compliance is TrueBasic
http://www.truebasic.com $39.00 for the Bronze Edition or Decimal Basic
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/ which is free. None of the
other BASICs available on the internet make mention of ANSI complianace.

John Fredrickson

  News@rtrussell 2006-12-15 04:16:10

Given that we can’t turn the clock back, a partial solution to this
problem would be for BASIC vendors to offer translators (to the extent
that it is possible) from ANSI/ISO BASIC to their particular variants.
That is something I would consider for BBC BASIC if I thought there was
a demand.

There is a precedent for this in the BASICODE project which developed a
platform-independent language that was converted (at run time, in that
case) to the native dialect of the machine on which it was run:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE (in German!)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BASICODE

Richard.
http://www.rtrussell.co.uk/
To reply by email change ‘news’ to my forename.

  Tom lake 2006-12-15 04:18:30

So far there isn’t a compiler that meets all the requirements of the Full
BASIC
standard. The one that comes closest is True BASIC and a good
implementation
of that can be had for $49.00 for the Silver edition in an “Annual” CD
compilation.
The lesser Bronze version is available free as a time-limited demo (15
minutes per session)
and $30.00 for the complete Bronze.

Official ANSI validation isn’t really necessary, I don’t believe. There are
plenty of people willing to test a compiler against the published spec for
free.

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-18 19:01:41

Why should I, as a developer support any standard? If it benefits
myself and my users, of course! However, until this discussion,
in hundreds of emails from users and potential users, the issue
of standards has never come up. All language compatibility
requests have been in regard to qbasic or even earlier versions
of msbasic; plus I think I had two requests for Dartmouth BASIC
compatible MAT command sub-keywords. Most other change requests
were not about language compatibility at all, but regarding system
specific extensions.

If the standard had documented the qbasic compatibility that most
users actually requested, then I might have been more interested
in working within it.

Once I changed the behavior of operator precedence to
match the Minimal Basic standard, and I got a complaint about
breaking compatibility with my previous less standard compliant
release. Why should I break user programs for a standard
they haven’t asked for?

If, of course, I were starting a new development with no user base,
those above questions might have a completely different answers.

IMHO. YMMV.
—
rhn A.T nicholson d.O.t C-o-M

  Michael mattia 2006-12-18 19:04:08

… with of course, your own convenience secondary to any benefits enjoyed by
the user community.

How often we forget that none of us have the careers we do but for the
existence of users.

MCM

  Tom lake 2006-12-18 19:06:16

The reason no one asks is because most people have grown up with
the MS variants on microcomputers. They don’t have any idea what’s
possible with Full BASIC. If you were to provide a conformant
compiler, you’d see that most people would not want to go
back. We have a chicken-and-egg situation. You won’t provide a
standard compiler until people ask but people won’t ask until they can
see what a standard compiler can do. It’s up to compiler writers to
break the cycle.

Tom Lake

  Michael mattia 2006-12-18 19:08:58

Oh, but the users do ask for this, it’s just not so easy to recognize…
and when they do, the compiler writers and developers have and will continue
to react: free-market economics doing its thing.

The actual pressure comes from senior user management, which asks why
software they paid for is not maintainable except by the original author.

While I certainly do not defend user management decisions to have their
software developed in “Joe’s BASIC” or “Bob’s C” , the net result is the
same… software which is expensive as h*** to maintain, and users at the
mercy of a very limited number of maintainers.

I saw this some 25 years ago, when “doing business electronically” first
became the rage. The number of private formats for data was exploding, and
users were complaining that in order to do buiness with many partners, they
had to pay for software for each different partner.

What we saw come out of that was…
1. The origin of widespread acceptance of the ANSI ASC X12 data format for
many buiness applications
2. The development within industries of standard data formats (best example
is the National Standard Format used in the Healthcare Industry).

We have also seen over the years a reduction of the quantity of software
written using “Joe’s BASIC” or “Bob’s C” and users demanding their
applications be written in a common, portable language… hmm, come to think
if it, we need to go back even further for this, approximately fifty (yes,
50) years… when the COBOL language was first developed and deployed.

Best guess today is nobody really cares to have an ANSI standard BASIC,
since there are many other langauges which are just as portable… and even
when the language product itself is fairly proprietary, the sheer magnitude
of the installed base has made it a defacto standard: e.g., I’ll bet you’ve
run into customers who specified “Microsoft Visual Basic” as the “only
qualified/permitted source code langauge for this application”

MCM

  Tom lake 2006-12-18 19:13:37

I just found this Japanese version called Decimal BASIC. It’s free but the English
version is still in progress. It includes the entire Core of Full BASIC and most of
the graphics module. It’s certainly worth a look!

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/index.htm

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-18 19:18:16

Perhaps you see a very different market than I do. Most Basic users
who have contacted me are in education, where they are purposely
not choosing one of the many good alternatives to Basic because
of either the cost or the learning curve. Maintainance by other
than the original developer is rarely an issue with early education
class projects and homework assignments. Over 90% of the easy
to read books on the subject are either using Street Basic (or
something MS still calls Basic for some reason).

The other portion of users are usually engineers who want to quickly
develop a one-off program and want something lighter weight to
script with than perl, javascript or XCode on their PDA or Mac.

Basic was not originally designed to be a corporate data processing
tool, even though almost all general purpose languages sometimes
find themselves miscast in that role.

IMHO. YMMV.
—
rhn A.T nicholson d.O.t C-o-M

  John fredricks 2006-12-18 19:33:31

Tom,

I’ve downloaded Decimal Basic and it does look very interesting. The Decimal
basic guys are the only ones out there who are promoting the Full basic
compatibility.

John Fredrickson

  Michael mattia 2006-12-19 00:51:11

The actual pressure comes from senior user management, which asks why
software they paid for is not maintainable except by the original author.

MCM

  Tom lake 2006-12-19 00:58:41

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008683/english/index.htm

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-19 01:01:29

The other portion of users are usually engineers who want to quickly
develop a one-off program and want something lighter weight to
script with than perl, javascript or XCode on their PDA or Mac.

Basic was not originally designed to be a corporate data processing
tool, even though almost all general purpose languages sometimes
find themselves miscast in that role.

IMHO. YMMV.
—
rhn A.T nicholson d.O.t C-o-M

  John fredricks 2006-12-19 01:08:29

Tom,

I’ve downloaded Decimal Basic and it does look very interesting. The Decimal
basic guys are the only ones out there who are promoting the Full basic
compatibility.

John Fredrickson

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-19 01:30:34

What specific features of the standard do people find desirable?
Decimal arithmetic? Control structure and “FOR” loop behavior?
Exception handling? IO? 2D graphics commands?
Are there any specific features of the standard which are useless
and/or non-optimal for your particular use of Basic?

As for myself, I find IEEE standard binary fp arithmetic preferable
for any scientific and engineering calculations for performance
reasons, since that is the standard that most modern hardware
supports.

I do like the smaller set of reserved words used by the standard
than in most street Basic implementations.

Thanks.
—
rhn A.T nicholson d.0.t C-o-M

  John fredricks 2006-12-19 01:33:27

Ron,

What I want is not any specific feature. Each application can make use of
features that another does not use. What I do want is to develop code to a
language standard so that anyone can run it regardless of their OS or BASIC
system. Take a look at the list of BASIC dialcts listed in this URL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects_by_platform

There are dozens of them, each one different and incompatible. We have no
defacto standard. Not even Visual Basic is a standard. VB6, VB.NET, VBS for
WSH, VBS for ASP, VBA for MS Office are all different. What we do have is
chaos in the markplace. That’s the problem.

John Fredrickson

  Michael mattia 2006-12-19 01:36:37

I hope they list BBx Business BASIC. That is not only source-compatible
across operating systems, it is p-code compatible, at least for MS-DOS and
Unix. Install the (operating system specific) runtime on your target
system, you can execute the p-code, or edit/enhance the source code.

Frankly I think the only way you could expect something this portable is via
use of an operating-system specific runtime module.

MCM

  Tom lake 2006-12-19 01:39:57

Decimal BASIC has had an update to the English version, bringing it in line with the
Japanese version. The additions are VIEWPORT,DEVICE WINDOW,DEVICE VIEWPORT,and CLIP.
As usual with software, the documentation doesn’t reflect this addition yet. To use
these statements, you have to set the Image Format to METAFILE (Printer) in the
Option – Graphics menu. This is another step toward total compliance with the ISO
standard for Full BASIC. Yay!

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-19 01:43:51

Decimal Basic appears to run on only one platform, MSWin, which
doesn’t help with one of the goals of the standard (cross platform
portability).

You can actually get more cross platform portability by using one the
more portable OSS “street Basic” variants (e.g.Yabasic runs under
MSWin, Mac OS X, BSD Unix, and linux).

IMHO. YMMV.
—
Ron N.
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic

  Tom lake 2006-12-19 01:46:50

Yes Decimal BASIC runs on only one platform but the source code can be run in True
BASIC (or any ISO BASIC compiler, when available) which runs on various platforms.
That’s what we need. Being able to run one source file on multiple platforms using
standard compilers from multiple vendors. If vendors standardize on ISO BASIC, we
can use any of their compilers and get the same result on any platform. Each vendor
would then only have to support one platform since other vendors would be handling
the other platforms. You’d have one vendor selling a compiler for Windows, one for
Linux, one for OSX, one for OS390, etc. If the compilers were validated, identical
source code would produce identical results independent of the platform. You
obviously wouldn’t necessarily need two vendors producing a compiler for the same
platform unless they differentiated themselves by the speed of the executable module
produced. Editing and debugging are covered by the ISO standard so even the user
interface would be virtually identical across vendors and platforms.

Tom Lake

  J. clarke 2006-12-20 10:47:43

What’s “possible” with this hypothetical non-Microsoft “full BASIC” that is
not possible with Microsoft Visual Basic other than writing code that will
port to a different OS?

—
–John
to email, dial “usenet” and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

  Tom lake 2006-12-20 10:54:03

The main feature is the MAT statement and its inclusion in graphics
statements
using matrix transforms, you can shift, rotate, shear graphics at assembly
language
speed using only BASIC commands. Of course MAT commands are also good for
solving simultaneous equations, they’re used in mechanical and electrical
engineering
and mny branches of mathematics. True you can add subprograms to other
dialects
to get most if not all the functionality but the point is, in ANS BASIC, you
don’t have
to use any addons and the speed is at full machine speed. If you didn’t come
from a
BASIC background in which MAT statements were present, you probably would
not have a good idea of the usefulness of them.

Tom Lake

  Rhnlogic 2006-12-20 10:57:24

However, note that the MAT statement is supported by several other
implementations of Basic besides any current ANSI full implementations.

And graphics support in ANSI full Basic seems fairly primitive by
todays
graphics standards (such as OpenGL with algorithmic pixel shaders,
etc.)
Are there any implementations of Basic which support any of the
contemporary cross-platform graphics standards?

IMHO. YMMV.
—
Ron N.
http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic

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Mombu

ANSI INCITS 113-1987 (R2003) Full BASIC compliant compilers and interpreters

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