iamaboringperson:
why is everyone so worried about basic anyway?
could another real programmer please explain the benefits?
Well, a simple to use environment for beginners, and easy to use commands- no need to include files and open libs to use them. Obviously for more experienced coders the language should provide the ability to include files etc as the programmer grows.
To begin with, C is pretty scary to get started with- so many options, just to get it to compile- I know, I've just been getting SDL working on VisualStudio6, and that's a pretty extensive IDE! A beginner would have had a hard time there! This could easily put off potential programmers, by making them give up in the early stages.
Basics tend to have a nice supportive community to help beginners (and more experienced coders), and have always had a games programming slant, and were the only places you could really learn games programming from.
The most important thing really, is the syntax- C, C++, Java all have a ghastly syntax, that IMO is very hard to read and debug- very cryptic looking with all those curly brackets :-(
With Basics, a lot of unnecessary brackets etc have been removed, which make it easier to read, and you can see much easier where a block begins and ends- like:
While
..
..
Wend
Anton Reinauer
Phoenix Developers Consortium
