dee.writing

I remember my first computer language was BASIC on ROM.
Yes, the one that “took over the system from BIOS” if we did not insert Disk Operating System. Yes, the one with line number as part of the language. Yes again, 64KB .

And then I used BASIC compiler, QuickBASIC 4.5 (heh, I still remember the version number !), TurboBASIC. And stayed with PowerBASIC for sometimes in those “golden era of text dominion”.

When Windows came, I tried Visual Basic Windows but I thought I did not like it. That’s just before I found Borland Delphi 1, (which I stick to until just now).

Then there were no BASIC for me . (Okay, except some VB scripts…)

But I always like BASIC, good for doing quickly-developed small stuff that do only one or two things.
I have tried many variants of BASIC: Euphoria, xBasic, xBLite, Gambas (yeah, it comes with most Linux), PureBASIC (commercial, cheap, GOOD!), and the RealBASIC, BASIC for the pro (and quite pricey too …). and RealBASIC Standard Edition for Linux is available for FREE.

Sometimes ago while I was visiting a free Assembler, I read article about FreeBASIC.
It was v0.15 something, and I found out that FreeBASIC is FREE, Open Source,
FAST (yes, find info in the forum why) and cross platform for Windows and Linux. There are some IDEs for FreeBASIC, and FBEdit is one of that. That’s it, I have found my BASIC.

FreeBASIC do not have a complete documentation yet, but FreeBASIC forum is good and contains useful resources and you will find nice people there !

Last thing, a guy nicked sir_mud made this FreeBASIC portable: FreeBASIC On the Go.
You can bring it along with other applications from Portable Apps, or your own.
And the nice part of On the Go, you can launch a batch file to update your copy of FreeBASIC with the daily update. Cool.