Amiga Basic

[SamuraiCrow]

bloodline wrote:
Is C really so hard, that you want to stick with BASIC?

YES IT IS!  I've been programming in C for years and still want to go back to Basic.  So badly, in fact, that I'm writing a compiler for Basic (with the help of Sidewinder).

It should be compatible with AmosPro in the first iteration with ACE and others set to become available in the new parser generator format later on.

[SamuraiCrow]

bloodline wrote:
But if you ignore pointers, references and datatypes (none of which you need for simple programs anyway), then there is nothing conceptually difficult about C... The syntax looks a little odd at first, but it is simple and consistant... If you have managed to get a handle on BASIC, then there is nothing difficult to understand in C!  

If you ignore the problem, that doesn't make it go away.  It took me years to learn C even after I learned Basic and Pascal.  I should have just stuck with Pascal and learned Delphi instead of C.  C++ is also a pain.

[SamuraiCrow]

bloodline wrote:

Eh? I mean that you don't need things like pointers, references and datatypes if you want to write simple programs in C... Just like you don't need them in BASIC... Though BlitzBasic also had these features... Then once you are used to the C syntax then you an learn about the more advanced concepts...

You have to be kidding about C++ is is a huge improvment over C!!!

I learned Assembly on the 68000 before I learned C.  That's the only way I could understand it.  Otherwise I'd still be learning it.

As for C++, it is an improvement over C.  It isn't an improvement over an Object Oriented Basic like VB.NET or anything like that.

[SamuraiCrow]

bloodline wrote:

amiga_3k wrote:
@bloodline:

Pardon my ignorance... but I've never heard of SDL :-S. Would it provide functions for, for instance, drawing a line between two coordinates? Could you point me to a good starting-point for information on this? I'm willing to learn :-).

Yes exacty, it is a C library that provides these functions! :-)

Head over to SDLorg website, if you need any help let me know!

Link:  http://www.libsdl.org/

[SamuraiCrow]

bloodline wrote:

Actually... AmigaE always looked more like a dialect BASIC, than anything else to my eyes... :-D

PortablE would probably be the best Amiga-related language available today.  It uses C++ as a backend on the high-end systems, and traditional AmigaE as a backend on the classics.

[SamuraiCrow]

This is a year-old thread.

What we need is a community driven basic language.

I like E optimizing, effeciency.

If we had an Amos -> AmigaE/PortableE translator, then use the E compiler we can have a greate portable,easy to use programming suite .

Mattathias is making an Amos to LLVM translator.  Early versions were going to use C as a backend but some command structures in Amos are not supported under C.  (That includes the On N Gosub command and even the gosub command in general.)

[SamuraiCrow]

Re:C vs. Basic

IMHO, C syntax exists because of a deficiency in old parsers and parser generators.   They process tokenization and syntactic analysis in two separate stages.  This was made obsolete with modern PEG parser generators which process multi-character tokens effortlessly using lookahead and backtracking instead of tokenization.

For a nice example of a PEG parser generator written in C who generates code in C, look at http://piumarta.com/software/peg/.  My partner is programming a version of it which generates LLVM Assembly instead of C at http://sourceforge.net/projects/llvmpeg/.