Is Amiga BASIC any good?

[melott]

@Evil_Nerd

Hay.. don't pay to much attention to what they say
about AmigaBasic. Yes its true it is MicroSoft basic
ported to Amiga and yes its Crap.

BUT for a beginner to learn on its good. Most of the
other basics are much harder to get started on, and
ACE basic 'IS' AmigaBasic with alot of improvements.

If you want to learn and start with AmigaBasic then
thats fine... you'll know when its time to move on
to AmiBlitz or Amos.

[melott]

@Wishmaster

AmigaBasic 'WILL NOT' run in fast ram.
You have to run 'NoFastMem' to run it then its
quite stable.

I used to run it on my A3k with 80 megs ram with
no problems.

I agree AmiBlitz or Amos is a much better language
but for him to start on a minimum system like an
unexpanded A500, I say go with AmigaBasic.

ACE basic (AmigaBasic w/Compiler & Extras) has a compiler
and many extra libs.
The main problem I found with AmigaBasic is the
basic editor/interpreter, its real crap.

[melott]

@Bloodline

I don't think he intends to rewrite AROS with it :-D

Just a place to start, and that is the point.

[melott]

@Kronos

I have a couple of books that I've had for (many) years
and it states that AmigaBasic won't run in fast ram.

It was said that the people at Commodore were a little
peaved because AppleBasic, which is the same basic ported
to Apple ran in fast ram. It was rummored there was a
patch wrote for AmigaBasic to make it run in fast ram.
I couldn't find a copy of it or even confirm that the
patch actually exists.

Anyway I tried to run it in fast ram on my A3k but
always crashed. As long as I ran NoFastMem first it
ran fine.
I have run it on my A3k with A WarpEngine 040 @40 mhz.
It will also run in an 800 x 600 screen but the book
examples don't work correctly.
After all is said and done AmigaBasic is 'Crap' but a
good place to start IMHO.

[melott]

@Kronos

You got me there :-)  I really don't know.
You're probably right ( I wouldn't know even if you were
wrong)
I was able to get AmigaBasic to run on my A3k and I
enjoyed playing around with for awhile.
I never tried to write anything useful with it, that
wasn't my goal. I had no real programing experience
and it was the easiest to start with.
At the time I had Blitz 2.1, AMOS and SAS C.
The learning curve is much higher on any of those as
compared to AmigaBasic, the choice was easy to make.