FreeBASIC 0.24 Released

[MilesAhead]

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=fa18785f0aac4ae0e818d0c380823264

If you'd like to try small stand-alone Win32 executables written in Basic then FreeBASIC may be a pleasant surprise.

If you prefer RAD form designer you can get Firefly free dialog designer. See this thread:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=27279.0

It doesn't require run-times.  The exe files are stand-alone executable 32 bit apps.  Can produce console or Gui apps.  The standard install comes with a bunch of include files(.bi files) for calling Win32 API functions in system DLLs, as well as other libraries.  If you like the Basic language it's just generally a fun software tool.

Probably the biggest shortcoming on the Windows platform is the dearth of COM support.  There's pretty much nothing built in.  There's a user-written ActiveX tool but it's not simple to use. If you must have something only available in COM then the trick is to code a DLL wrapper in a COM-friendly programming language, as calling functions in DLLs is pretty easy.

Also has versions for other platforms such as Linux.

[MilesAhead]

FreeBASIC 0.24 Released  Has interesting new features and fixes including: Type info for objects inherited from Object; launch routine as a thread etc..

See this link for info and downloads:

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20252

[tslim]

Hi MilesAhead,

I am programming in VFP, which I don't find its IDE a good teaching ground.

I was thinking to give my kids some basic programming lessons on my own, is FreeBASIC  suitable for that? I am looking for kind of IDE where it is easy to see a test run result for codes...
Or do you have a better suggestion.

Btw, till today, I have very sweet memory on those days when I learn QuickBasic
I wonder if QuickBasic will run on winXP.

[MilesAhead]

If you look around I think you'll find some open source or free implementation of QB.

For command line apps the FBIDE that comes with FreeBASIC is good. But it's not a drag & drop designer.  There's Firefly that works with FB 0.23. I don't know if it's so great for kids as the WinAPI calls are collected into a wrapper library. But you can drag and drop edit boxes buttons etc.. to do the Gui part.

But I think I would take a look around to see if you can find QB open source clones. I know I've seen them around. I don't know if they come with IDE or any details really. There are open source implementations of TurboVision for Pascal.

But for simple command line apps FreeBASIC FBIDE is fine. You can compile and run out of the editor. And FB does have some "compatibility modes" that help it tolerate QB syntax as well as VB etc..

The online forum people are pretty friendly.  They don't rip your guts out before helping with your problem.

edit: if you still have the real Dos QB compiler you may be able to run it on top of DosBox free dos emulator.