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Do you think that Visual Basic has lost sight of it’s basic roots with way to much complexity, and do you think hundreds of dollars is too much to pay? Well I do, so the following ramblings are my thoughts on free, or reasonably priced Basic’s of differing flavors: Liberty Basic is very robust in terms of graphics support and allows calls to win32 APIs. It is reasonably priced, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a program better supported by its author using Yahoo groups. Want to write a quick and dirty program with no graphics -- no problem -- it’ll send output directly to the IDE popup window. That said, it’s unfortunate that the author has some rather odd notions concerning content and use. For instance: y = -a is unacceptable. You must write y = a*-1. Huh? This is supposed to be BASIC! Also, be prepared to live with one of the most limited set of math functions I’ve seen in any Basic. But, it’s stable in the win32 environment and it is NOT a VB clone -- non-graphical programming lives (if you want it)! IMHO it is best to write the core code non-graphically and then wrap it in a fancy box. Too often you tend to get so distracted by the graphical interface, that you lose sight of the programming goal. Liberty Basic also has some some excellent third party support programs. The bottom line is that this Basic is currently being updated on a continuing basis, and it has support! Most other Basics are either much more expensive or appear to be hobby type, mostly ignored, projects.Most programs listed on this site are old Apple basic programs re written in Liberty Basic 2.0 -- they can easily be run on the unregistered shareware version -- the shareware version is not crippled to any large extent). Smallbasic is cross platform and free, which makes it very attractive. Smallbasic for win32 is rather hard to find on the Smallbasic site, so here is a direct link to the file for downloading purposes. Smallbasic has excellent math support, including MAT functions. It’s a bit unstable in win32 -- was built for Linux, but unfortunately there are no Linux binary installs. Hotpaw is a must have if your working with a Palm PDA and using databases like Handbase or Jfile -- it’s the macro language of the Palm world -- but it really needs a win32 counterpart. Right now, unfortunately, you have to use the Palm emulator to run it on a desktop. Almost looks like a clone of Smallbasic with some more PalmOS database functionality. I haven’t used ibasic but it looks very promising, and reasonably priced ( http://www.pyxia.com/ibasic.html). Truebasic might be a viable option, and I would like to hear any comments concerning its use. It has a Netscape plugin that allows programs to be run from a browser -- excellent idea! Rapid-Q, a freeware Linux/win32 application, appears to have run out of steam -- no updates since 2000. KBasic, a Basic program for Linux KDE, is making noises but not much progress (what a gift to the Linux world it would be if Liberty Basic shared code with KBasic). Xbasic is a VB wannabe with a very unintuitive interface. Well, a little Googling will show more, including Powerbasic -- only $199 (not even going to link that one), and VB.Net only $109 (yep, buy that $29 version and wait for the MS police to knock on your door)! All told, Liberty Basic is very hard to beat in terms of support and value, and definitely worth a try. Other links: Catalog of free interpreters and compilers (many links are broken).
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