- BB: The future: Is there one?

From: CFB Software <"CFB>
Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 00:01:31 +0930

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: blackbox{([at]})nowhere.xy
> Behalf Of Les May
>
> That would seem to set out the 'Road Map' for the future of BB: Embed
> Component Pascal in a more 'mainstream' IDE. By this I mean one that
> enables a new user to utilise existing skills. This is the
> path Zonnon
> is attempting to take even though progress seems to be slow.
>

Not surprisingly - I believe the actual compiler work is currently a
one-man task.

> It is of course correct to say that the FreePascal and FreeBasic
> projects do not include facilties for easily creating a GUI.
> (FreePascal
> + GTK widgets on Linux is workable but not fun!) But compared with BB
> they are both immensely popular. As BB which does have this
> ability is
> also 'free', this surely raises the question of why there is this
> disparity in popularity.

FreePascal has been free for nearly a decade. BlackBox has only been
free for just over a year.

>
> The UPPERCASE/lowercase point seems to have been misunderstood. I am
> typing this with the Caps Lock key off. Each time I type an uppercase
> character I depress the Shift key with my little finger. This is the
> most 'natural' way to do things simply because much of the
> time I use my
> keyboard to type text documents. Using uppercase for keywords
> makes the
> process less 'natural'. I'm told that Wirth decided to use
> uppercase in
> Modula 2 and Oberon because it made constructing the compiler
> simpler.

Efficiency rather than simplicity I believe - see my earlier reply
today. The compiler could be modified in a couple of hours to accept
lowercase keywords - most of the changes are limited to the single
procedure DevCPS.Get. However, such a change would have major negative
consequences for much existing CP code.
 
> don't mind that the keywords accepted by the compiler have to be
> uppercase. I just think an editor which accepted either/both
> case(s) and
> changed each keyword to uppercase immediately after <ret> was pressed
> would be a big improvement.
>

Agreed - as long as it could discriminate between a keyword and other
identifiers. <ret> I use for starting a new line, so would prefer
another key.

> Interestingly Zonnon has lowercase keywords.
>

Actually it is designed to have either all lowercase keywords or all
uppercase keywords depending on the case of the identifier 'MODULE' (or
'module'). So far only one has been implemented - lowercase, I believe.

> Wirth constantly sought to make each of the languages he invented an
> improvement on the last one. I doubt that he would consider
> BB as 'the
> last word'.
>

Agreed.

--
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp
--- BlackBox
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Received on Sun May 21 2006 - 16:31:31 UTC