Category:FutureBasic: Difference between revisions
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⚫ | FutureBasic began life at the dawn of Apple's Macintosh in the mid-1980s as ZBasic, an implementation of '''BASIC''' -- the ''Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code'' -- which had been around since the language was invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College during 1963 and 1964. |
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⚫ | Major update releases introduced a full-featured Appearance Compliant runtime written by the late New Zealander Robert Purves renown for his brilliant programming. Once completely carbonized to run natively on the Mac OS X, the FutureBASIC Integrated Development Environment (FB IDE) was called FB4 and released in July 2004. |
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⚫ | The FutureBasic mailing list is a free service to the FB programming community, courtesy of associate.com. The list is available by online, and/or by email subscription to anyone interested FB programming on the Macintosh. List members include raw beginners through published commercial software authors. The FB development team and some long-time enthusiasts are knowledgeable and friendly and are very quick to respond to questions posted on the list. In addition, demonstration program code is frequently posted here. |
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⚫ | In August 2005, Staz Software was devastated by Hurricane Katrina just at the time Apple was transitioning from Motorola PPC microprocessors to Intel chips. FB development slowed almost to a standstill. On January 1, 2008, Staz Software announced that FB would henceforth be freeware and FB4 with FBtoC 1.0 was made available. |
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⚫ | Discusses the history of FutureBasic and its predecessor, ZBasic, from the early days of the Macintosh when it was a commercial product, until its morph into today's robust front end to the clang compiler. Information on this page can be outdated, to a better source of the most current information about FB can be found at the web sites above. |
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⚫ | On Sunday, June 3, 2012, members of the FB List Serve were notified that Robert Purves had died after a long bout with cancer. The news came as a surprise to many FB developers who were unaware of Purves' illness. While coping with cancer, he continued as an active member of the FB community, improving FB, answering questions, solving problems, and posting exquisitely terse code often salted with pithy remarks from his wonderfully dry humor. He never mentioned his health problems and never complained. |
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== Why FutureBasic? == |
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Considering the contempt some programmers have for the BASIC language -- "BASIC ruins programmers" -- it's almost a shame FB has the word "Basic" in its name. Not only can FB handle BASIC source code, but since it is a front end to clang, it can translate C, Apple's Core Foundation, Objective-C (Cocoa), HTML, XML, SOAP, UNIX commands, Open GL, etc. This makes it an excellent tool for prototyping -- especially for programmatic Objective-C when the overhead of Xcode is not needed. |
Considering the contempt some programmers have for the BASIC language -- "BASIC ruins programmers" -- it's almost a shame FB has the word "Basic" in its official name. Not only can FB handle BASIC source code, but since it is a front end to clang, it can translate C, Apple's Core Foundation, Objective-C (Cocoa), HTML, XML, SOAP, UNIX commands, Open GL, etc. This makes it an excellent tool for prototyping -- especially for programmatic Objective-C when the overhead of Xcode is not needed. |
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⚫ | According to Wikipedia, FutureBasic began life at the dawn of Apple's Macintosh in the mid-1980s as ZBasic, an implementation of '''BASIC''' -- the ''Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code'' -- which had been around since the language was invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College during 1963 and 1964. |
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⚫ | Major update releases introduced a full-featured Appearance Compliant runtime written by the late New Zealander Robert Purves renown for his brilliant programming. Once completely carbonized to run natively on the Mac OS X, the FutureBASIC Integrated Development Environment (FB IDE) was called FB4 and released in July 2004. |
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⚫ | In August 2005, Staz Software was devastated by Hurricane Katrina just at the time Apple was transitioning from Motorola PPC microprocessors to Intel chips. FB development slowed almost to a standstill. On January 1, 2008, Staz Software announced that FB would henceforth be freeware and FB4 with FBtoC 1.0 was made available. |
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⚫ | The FutureBasic mailing list is a free service to the FB programming community, courtesy of associate.com. The list is available by online, and/or by email subscription to anyone interested FB programming on the Macintosh. List members include raw beginners through published commercial software authors. The FB development team and some long-time enthusiasts are knowledgeable and friendly and are very quick to respond to questions posted on the list. In addition, demonstration program code is frequently posted here. |
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⚫ | On Sunday, June 3, 2012, members of the FB List Serve were notified that Robert Purves had died after a long bout with cancer. The news came as a surprise to many FB developers who were unaware of Purves' illness. While coping with cancer, he continued as an active member of the FB community, improving FB, answering questions, solving problems, and posting exquisitely terse code often salted with pithy remarks from his wonderfully dry humor. He never mentioned his health problems and never complained. A tribute to Purves can be found at the bottom of the FB Home Page |
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⚫ | Discusses the history of FutureBasic and its predecessor, ZBasic, from the early days of the Macintosh when it was a commercial product, until its morph into today's robust front end to the clang compiler. Information on this page can be outdated, to a better source of the most current information about FB can be found at the web sites above. |
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