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ThinBASIC is a computer language with roots set in BASIC. The original BASIC did not ask the user to declare any type for the variables, it simply stored them as a number using 30 bits of precision.

Many of the modern computer languages (Lua, Python, Ruby...) try to mimic this design by hiding the internal variable storage details from the programmer. This approach has the clear advantage of keeping things simple. Number is a number, text is a text. Programmer focuses on the problem instead of implementation. So far so good.

The possible controversy of this approach starts to appear once you realize the program needs to run on physical device whose resources are limited. The mentioned approach of variable complexity hiding also poses two issues as well for people who would start with such a language as with their first programming language:

• the correlation between program memory usage and variables is unclear
• performance characteristics can vary surprisingly, as the language switches the backends and performs the memory reallocations

ThinBASIC takes different route.
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TBGL rendering system is internally based on the OpenGL technology, therefore it shares the state machine oriented design. This means that once you set some of the states, such as drawing color, it stays enabled until you change it to something else. While this can be advantageous in some situations, in others it can cause problem, especially when trying to write modular code.

This article describes the possible side effects of state handling and proposes new code style which should help you write modular graphic code of better quality.
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I'm happy to say that thinBasic is running just fine under recently released Windows 8 Consumer Preview

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Largo, i have done an experiment . making a bundled exe: file "ok.exe" without choosing to obfuscate the source.
now when i ...

Dear all,

I've added a new functionality to thinBasic community forum: thinBasic Applications Forum

What is this about? ...

I'm happy to say that thinBasic 1.8.9.0 works perfectly under Windows 8 Developer Preview recently released to the public by Microsoft.
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Chiedo ospitalita' sul forum, e mi scuso per il messaggio in italiano ma il mio
inglese lascia molto a desiderare.

Di ...

ThinBASIC offers the continuously developed TBGL library since year 2005. It is module focusing on providing way to draw graphics hardware accelerated way, but only with features which are widely adopted. That means, only "safe" functionality is added, so programmer can sleep peacefuly, because his scripts will run on any PC with properly installed GPU drivers.

But in real world, there are situations, when you simply need to use even the cutting edge features or features not commonly implemented by all hardware vendors. One of such a features is offscreen rendering, and this article will tell you for what it can be useful, what are the basic principles and it finally gives you sample implementation and script examples.
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Hi,

during Game Access 2010 there was one nice technique mentioned "by the way" as approach used for modelling chicken ...