- BB: The future: Is there one?

From: [at]} <Les>
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 14:11:51 +0100

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What seems to be quite clear is that what users really value about BB is
the Component Pascal language. The reason also seems clear; its use
leads to correctly functioning programs which do exactly what they are
intended to do.

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.

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. In addition if it is the ability of Component
Pascal to produce correct programs which is important, rather than its
GUI creation capacity, does the lack of GUI capacity in FreePascal and
FreeBasic really come into the comparison in popularity.

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. I
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.

Interestingly Zonnon has lowercase keywords.

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'.

Les May

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Received on Sun May 21 2006 - 15:11:51 UTC