Is Amiga BASIC any good?

[evil_nerd]

Hello,

I've got an Amiga 500 that now works, and I have a book on Amiga BASIC and a disk with Amiga BASIC. Is this any good???

[Kronos]

Lets see:

It is >15 years old.
It breaks ALL rules bout coding for Amiga
It doesn't use most of the Amiga-specifics
.
.
.
.
.IT WAS MADE BY MICROSOFT !!!!

Nuff said  :-P

[seer]

That's M$ Basic... Whadaya think ?

I guess it's okay to begin with, but it's old, dated and has been the day it was released..


[edit]
Kronos types to fast
[/edit]

[Karlos]

Amiga Basic? Is that the Microsoft version?

I suppose it depends on what you want to do with it. Never cared for Basic languages much, but I do remember Blitz Basic being quite handy at times.

[lorddef]

depends what you want to do with it. For reasonably simple stuff it should be fine, although for more complex stuff it will be inadequate.  I think there was blitz basic which was actually quite powerfull and had blitter functions and all that.

With amiga programming I really know {bleep}, just what I've heard from other folks, perhaps someone can expand on that.  Oneday when I have the time I will have a look at doing a bit of amiga c++.

[Mikkihii]

NO!! Not even for beginners.
Try BlitzBasic or Amos.

[evil_nerd]

IF ITS MICRO$OFT, I REFUSE TO USE IT

[ChaosLord]

I've got an Amiga 500 that now works, and I have a book on Amiga BASIC and a disk with Amiga BASIC. Is this any good???

No.

The following BASICs for Amiga are each 20x better or more:
True BASIC
Metacomco BASIC
A/C 97
HiSoft BASIC
AMOS
Ace BASIC
Blitz BASIC
COMAL
Basic V
GFA BASIC
bywater BASIC
Pure BASIC

[Kronos]

@ChaosLord

Dunno bout the others, but would you please scrap GFA-Basic from that list ?

That one is even worse than AmigaBasic  :-x

[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.

[that_punk_guy]

evil_nerd wrote:
IF ITS MICRO$OFT, I REFUSE TO USE IT

Yeeouch, no need to shout. ;-)

AmigaBASIC would have been a great learning language if the example programs were commented and documented properly. There's a ton of interesting stuff dealing with ILBMs and things, but as soon as you get to the meat of the program there's no explanation at all as to what it's doing. Shame.

There was a BASIC compiler called Cursor freely available, which was compatible with AmigaBASIC. I used to write stuff for that before I inevitably got bored of its limitations.

[TheMagicM]

Yes get rid of GFA!! I rented it, tried it out, and it sucked.  AmigaBASIC is ok.. but do try Blitz

[Im>bE]

My prefered Basic language
is Amiblitz2, the amiga sequel to Blitz Basic 2.

Blitz Basic 2 is good,
but Amiblitz2:

-Is 10 times more stable than Blitz2
 (Never or rarely crash)
-compiles code 8 times faster than Blitz2
-Has an optional optimizer
 that makes progs go 2-5 times faster
 than blitz2 compiled progs.
-Is free and opensource
-Is still supported
-Is 6 times more userfriendly than blitz2
-Has (acid) command guides included
 in the amiblitz2 archive on aminet


If you wanna code in basic on amiga,
then I HIGHLY reccomend amiblitz2.

It might be troublesome to get it working
on an a500 without hd or extra ram tho,
so the disk version of blitz2 by Acid
might be a better start.

[Lo]

The worst thing about AmigaBasic is not M$, its the fact that it is not 32 bit "pure".

[Amiga1200PPC]

It crashes, if you have more than 8 MB of RAM, because M$ is too damn stupid and is misusing the address bits.