Hi folks,
Now I never thought I'd hear the name AMOS uttered again, I got to know Amos very well (I had a bit of a head start as I was a Beta tester for AMOS something like 2 years before it's general release, met up with Francois on a couple of occasions to discuss bugs, which even to this day still exist )
AMOS was certainly excellent as a starting point to learn the BASIC language, but it did have it's limitations, it was not exactly system friendly, i.e. the way it handled screens, i.e. it did everything it's own way, and was not much good for working with Intuition screens (It was POSSIBLE, but not exactly straghtforward) so certainly a re-write would be needed, if the guys doing a AMOS version for AOS do a good job, perhaps this is a good possibility.
My next choice would be HiSoft Basic, gives you lots of control when you need it, and would probably work "out of the box" on OS4, ( not tried that yet of course, but I intend to) as it uses standard intuition screens, it is a complied language, but of course it's only going to compile to 68K code so you are not going to get the maximum speed possible, but should run at a very respectable speed nontheless.
One of the advantages of Hisoft is that it's still available and cheap !, I bought a copy from Hisoft a few weeks ago for about £10.
Also as someone suggested, we have PureBasic, I think this looks quite promising, the developers are planning a PPC version, so your code will run at it's best speed, and it also has the advantage that you can port your BASIC programs between several different platforms with little alteration. I've also registered a copy of Purebasic so I'll be giving that some testing as soon as the PPC version is ready.
Non of the BASIC languages I have seen so far give the ease of MS Visual Basic, i.e. draw a button on screen, click it and all you have to do is write the code for what to do when you click the button, none of
IF MOUSE KEY=1 AND XMOUSE >= xstart AND XMOUSE <= xend AND YMOUSE >=ystart AND YMOUSE <= yend THEN [do something]
sort of code
And what a pain it is if you want to move the button around afterwards
BUT this classic way of programming gives you much more power to customise what your after.
SO in brief, I think it all boils down to exaclty what you need out of a BASIC language, but I think it comes down to HiSOFT of PureBasic as they are availavle NOW and you can start learning the basic BASIC language until something better comes along.
Regards
Paul Townsend
Amigaone Productions
