CompuServe Thread

John, I think you should write a book on AmigaBasic – the only books on the subject besides the manual are 2 books from COMPUTE! one for beginners and one for intermediate/advanced which hasn't been released yet. A book that deals with libraries, sound and graphics would be great. Marlene

John, I think you should write a book on AmigaBasic – the only books on the subject besides the manual are 2 books from COMPUTE! one for beginners and one for intermediate/advanced which hasn't been released yet. A book that deals with libraries, sound and graphics would be great. Marlene

Well, the "build 'em yourself" libraries in conjunction with calling them from BASIC would be a marvellous thing for perhaps 80-90% of future Amiga owners. I feel that most people who own any machine are sort of part time sometimes programmers who don't mind firing up an interpretive language for the odd job. The problems with this are twofold. First, there may be speed problems, and it would be nice if they could call libraries made up perhaps by others to do specific tasks, such as sorting, repetitive transcendentals, etc. COMAL 2.0 on the 64 is a beautiful case in point. The language allows you to LINK libraries in and to use them with very COMAL-like syntax. This has resulted in a wealth of public domain libraries ranging all the way from specialized math libraries to "error messages in Spanish". The other (more obvious) advantage is of course the fact that there are things that you just can't get at from BASIC.

Well, the "build 'em yourself" libraries in conjunction with calling them from BASIC would be a marvellous thing for perhaps 80-90% of future Amiga owners. I feel that most people who own any machine are sort of part time sometimes programmers who don't mind firing up an interpretive language for the odd job. The problems with this are twofold. First, there may be speed problems, and it would be nice if they could call libraries made up perhaps by others to do specific tasks, such as sorting, repetitive transcendentals, etc. COMAL 2.0 on the 64 is a beautiful case in point. The language allows you to LINK libraries in and to use them with very COMAL-like syntax. This has resulted in a wealth of public domain libraries ranging all the way from specialized math libraries to "error messages in Spanish". The other (more obvious) advantage is of course the fact that there are things that you just can't get at from BASIC.

I haven't programmed BASIC in any volume since 1979, but I thought I'd pass this on. The new TrueBASIC appears to be shipping, or at least accepting orders, for the Amiga. The basic package is about $150.00 (not bad) but in order to create stand-alone programs, you'll need the stand-alone package, at $500.00 (expensive beyond my tastes). This language appears to be one of the bast designed BASICs around. It is incrementally compiled into a virtual machine code they call b-code, so it runs much faster than an interpreted BASIC (sound anything like COMAL?). It supports separately compiled modules so that you can build up lobraries (libraries) of useful routines, some of which they sell. Probably the best sounding clam is that TrueBASIC code is 100% portable from machine to machine. It currently will also run on the MAC and the IBM PC. They achieve this by hiding implementation details on each machine in their functions. Thus, when you open a window, you supply the virtual size of it, and the window command takes care of scaling that to the machine that its running on. The language also supports a large battery of matrix functions, the likes of which I haven't seen this side of some of the HP minicomputer BASICs. This language is very structured (not that AmigaBASIC isn't). I haven't used it myself, but I thought that anyone out there who's not quite satisfied with BASIC but doesn't want to learn C could probably do some serious programming in TrueBASIC.

I haven't programmed BASIC in any volume since 1979, but I thought I'd pass this on. The new TrueBASIC appears to be shipping, or at least accepting orders, for the Amiga. The basic package is about $150.00 (not bad) but in order to create stand-alone programs, you'll need the stand-alone package, at $500.00 (expensive beyond my tastes). This language appears to be one of the bast designed BASICs around. It is incrementally compiled into a virtual machine code they call b-code, so it runs much faster than an interpreted BASIC (sound anything like COMAL?). It supports separately compiled modules so that you can build up lobraries (libraries) of useful routines, some of which they sell. Probably the best sounding clam is that TrueBASIC code is 100% portable from machine to machine. It currently will also run on the MAC and the IBM PC. They achieve this by hiding implementation details on each machine in their functions. Thus, when you open a window, you supply the virtual size of it, and the window command takes care of scaling that to the machine that its running on. The language also supports a large battery of matrix functions, the likes of which I haven't seen this side of some of the HP minicomputer BASICs. This language is very structured (not that AmigaBASIC isn't). I haven't used it myself, but I thought that anyone out there who's not quite satisfied with BASIC but doesn't want to learn C could probably do some serious programming in TrueBASIC.