Hello,

Small Intro:

I love BASIC since the days of Apple //e.  Later in life I learned  
Pascal, C, Java, Tcl/Tk, and Perl.  Yet they never really satisfied my  
needs.  TclTk came close but it suffered from being interpreted and  
tied to its Tk graphical toolkit.  Fast forward to today.  I browsed  
the local Barnes & Noble and bought a book about BlitzMax.  This  
peeked my curiosity and I Googled for other BASIC interpreters/ 
compilers available for the Mac OS.  I found BCX which was a Windows  
Basic to C translator.  Pretty neat with Windows graphics capability.   
I started to plan to port it to OS X when I discovered Chipmunk and  
FutureBasic.

User Questions:

1) There are many BASIC dialects around and it looks like Chipmunk and  
FB are distinct from each other.  Which dialect is the more popular  
one?  Which dialect is better structured to provide better OOP?  Do  
they both offer a fully mature OOP environment?

2) The documentation are not clear on this... how do each build their  
graphical support?  Are they both using OpenGL API for their graphics  
window?  A proprietary library/API?  Something else?

3) How closely are they knitted to the Mac OS X frameworks?

4) FB is a Carbon application?  Any plans to make it UB?

5) Is there an FB interpreter so that one does not need to compile in  
order to test/debug the application?

Developer Questions:

6) Is it the developer's intention to make the FBtoC the main compiler  
front-end, and then have back-ends for specific platforms?

7) Can the output of FBtoC be used seamlessly in the XCode environment?

8) How can I help?  I took a compiler course in college and loved it  
(using FLEX/BISON to compile the C language into Sparc assembly).

Thanks,
Ellery