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FreeBasic

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Re: FreeBasic

#2
I started programming when I was around 12. My teacher told me about how he learned BASIC in school...so I went home and looked up BASIC. I had a lot of fun messing around with qbasic/qb64 and finally FreeBASIC. Semi-related but one of my favorite books of all time was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell. It's wild to think how much of an impact that book and FreeBASIC had on me. If I could upvote this a thousand times I would.

Re: FreeBasic

#5

I started programming when I was around 12. My teacher told me about how he learned BASIC in school...so I went home and looked up BASIC. I had a lot of fun messing around with qbasic/qb64 and finally FreeBASIC. Semi-related but one of my favorite books of all time was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell. It's wild to think how much of an impact that book and FreeBASIC had on me. If I could upvo…

I remember the same thing and eventually seeing DarkBASIC in stores and PureBASIC on a few shelves as well in the 90s. I gravitated towards BlitzBasic because the developer (Mark Sibly) was genuinely interested and improving his system, forging a good community and making some cool looking stuff along the way. For years I wrote BB, B3D, and a few other dialects of BASIC for doing game-related and demo-related things.

Re: FreeBasic

#6

I really miss the Blitz Basic family of game engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC After reading the wikipeda page I found out Mr Sibly made them open source in 2014. I wonder if there is much community around them now?

There kind of is a community, but it's hard to say. Long ago in the earlier days of BB and B3D we had great community support because (a) most of us were on the official blitzresearch servers and (b) many of us were on blitzcoder.co.uk because of some of the problems at the official servers.

I'm still friends with many of the prolific creators on Facebook in that space.

It was FOSS'd in the later years, which is great, but it doesn't really solve many of the problems or make it easier to work with BlitzBasic code for most people. Some of us spent some time on some translation layer-like technologies with the main goal usually being someone can run a `.bb` file in the browser having it auto-transpiled into a bastardized version of Ecmascript running WebGL.

Re: FreeBasic

#9
I learned Basic on a ZX Spectrum clone when I was a kid.

It was harder to structure the code because there were no functions and subroutines, just line numbers and goto.

No while, no fors. Just ifs.

When I've learned x86 assembly later, it didn't seem too different to me.

This variant of Basic is more close to Pascal for me than the Basic I've learned.

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