On Jan 19, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Ellery Bann wrote: > the local Barnes & Noble and bought a book about BlitzMax. Blitz is a gaming-centric language, with strong graphic and sound support, some Carbon UI support. It is not great for general-pupose use. > 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? These are not object-oriented languages. Both are traditional, linear / event-driven languages. After all, C code is generated, not C+ + or Objective-C. (CocoaBASIC and REALbasic are both OOP with complete IDEs. RB is popular with small developers who need crossplatform products. It's not Cocoa -- yet -- but they are working to use Cocoa under the hood of the Mac version. That's going to be interesting to see how they pull that off.) Chipmunk is a simple interpreter, not a compiler. It is comparable to QBasic (QuickBASIC without compiling). FB is translated to C (FBtoC) and then compiled. You could, in theory, do whatever you want with the C code. I have no idea what the future holds for FB in relation to Cocoa controls / support -- Apple does not release the format of .nib files created in Interface Builder. > 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? FutureBASIC has no problem accessing any graphics API. There are a lot of samples around for creating graphics and Carbon-based user interfaces. > 3) How closely are they knitted to the Mac OS X frameworks? Cocoa is the only framework being actively developed and supported by Apple. If you want complete access, you need to code in Objective-C. However, the older, time-tested Carbon API is not going anywhere soon! I'm sure there will be Carbon apps for at least another five to ten years... if not longer. By then, FB will probably have ways deal with Cocoa. > 4) FB is a Carbon application? Any plans to make it UB? Yes, Carbon. > 5) Is there an FB interpreter so that one does not need to compile > in order to test/debug the application? No. > 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? Strictly a Mac project. > 7) Can the output of FBtoC be used seamlessly in the XCode > environment? Not seamless, but I've loaded the C code with no problems to study it. > 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). Boy, some of us have a long, long wish list for certain things. I had been working on SQLite and FB... but that was a long time ago. I hope the developers will consider some way to use "CoreData" (SQLite) for desktop databases. - CSW