Thanks a lot Eros,
this look to the future was long awaited, and I am happy to see it so nicely summarized here.
Ad 1
That sounds great. I am more and more getting used to OOP style of coding, so this is definitely good idea
Ad 2
Yes please
Ad 3
No problem.
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Again great.
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Sounds good to me, I did not used third party COM libraries yet, but dotted syntax is the way for this.
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This is funny. When I started on ThinBASIC project, OOP programming was pure evil in my eyes. With the years I am more and more fascinated by this concept, and I am 100% voting for having it in ThinBASIC. I did brief PDF proposal about OOP model in ThinBASIC, I removed the dust from the file and attach it here. The 50% of PowerBASIC for me are the fantastic, unmatched José Roca headers.
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Very good to have.
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Very good to have.
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Especially the icon and resources would be appreciated.
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This is interesting point and something to think about. I also love PowerBASIC to the max, especially the version 9 got me excited.
I like its string handling, inline assembly, the introduction of OOP model and on the first place - rock stability.
In the past years I tried various other languages, as part of school classes or during my own investigations.
I must say I found just 2 tools which got my attention (when I do not count pure thinBasic itself):
- C#
- Oxygen
The first one because it was the first languge where OOP made sense for me. But for our purposes it is something not usable, as it has .NET dependancy, and the work with strings is very weak, especially for people used to BASIC. +/- the same for Java - requiring Java installed could be problem, I am personally quite annoyed by agressive Java on task bar on laptops, if I need it for some applet I install it, try the applet, and the uninstall.
The Oxygen is converging very well to compiler of my dreams - it has OOP very close to C# model I like so much, it has BASIC syntax, it can create DLLs and now it can compile bith 32bit/64bit EXEs and Charles is man-compiler and reliable guy. The only problem I have with Oxygen, is the lack of documentation and proper IDE + debugging tools.
I am not sure if these solutions are already mature enough to hold the thinBASIC project on its shoulders. In my experience, C# programming flows very well, but there were some reliability issues (maybe more related to .NET as such), which keep me off using C# for projects I would consider selling or sharing with other people. Oxygen is great as I said, only the mentioned (definitely solvable) problems make me undecided. I cannot judge the stability, as I use it for little tests.
That is why I still use PB9 for TBGL development, I trust the tool and it is documented.
For me, the press on multiplatformity is not so big. If I would say one, it would be Linux, but I am not using it too frequently. I usually install it, play with it and remove it again. I am sure ThinBASIC could become a star on Linux on the other side... I still remember E.K mentioning the lack of Linux port the only problem
The 64bit Windows question is more interesting to me for the memory it can allocate.
Last note regarding the portability across the OSs - it would mean having module of UI not based on catching Windows messages, but working in more abstract way, like Delphi/VB/C# did - that means handling events using OnClick and other automatically fired callback functions not dependent on platform.
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There is one thing I would add to the magic list, and that is Exception handling, I summarized it a while ago, and still think it is good feature to have:
Exception handling proposal open for discussion
Petr
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