Simple Computing

Run Basic Personal Server 1.0 is available for purchase at http://runbasic.com/ . The license price is $59.95. Here are some links organized by Alyce Watson, a long-time Liberty Basic community leader: If you haven't tried Run BASIC, you'll want to visit the free online trial version here: http://runbasic.com/ The forum is here: http://runbasic.proboards82.com/ The community wiki is here: http://runbasic.wikispaces.com/ What is Run BASIC? It's a web programming language that includes a server. Read more here: http://runbasic.wikispaces.com/FAQs and here: http://runbasic.wikispaces.com/WebServer Online documentation and tutorials: http://www.runbasic.com/docs/rbhelp.html

We're up to Release Candidate 3. Carl announced that he's preparing for the official release of Run Basic Personal Server 1.0 this weekend! The Run Basic forum is also open to the public. Only the "Run Basic Beta Testing" area requires a login.

Carl invited me to be a beta tester for his upcoming Run Basic product about 4 months ago. This week he released Release Candidate 1 to the beta testing group. It's been exciting to see the evolution of RB from Beta 2 through Beta 5 to RC1. New features that aren't publicly available at www.runbasic.com include: A new syntax to use objects. (e.g. #object method). You can see the Smalltalk influence and the syntax leverages a Liberty Basic programmer's conceptual model of handles. An XMLparser object. A SQLITE object. A FILE object. A TABLE object. HTTPGet$ function that performs an HTTP GET. Carl stated that there will be a few more release candidates before the official release of the Run Basic Personal Server. There will be an "Enterprise" version available at a later date which should include version control and enterprise database access. This release will be the most significant event in the Basic programming world since the introduction of Visual Basic for...

I'm working on the next release of Tiny Basic. Here's the latest list of enhancements: Added GOSUB/RETURN statements. Added TITLEBAR statement for the interpreter console. Increased program lines from 100 to 1024. Rewrote the MEM code. Added runtime error handling in the interpreter. It trys to recover to the READY prompt. Created test program for the interpreter (i.e. primitive unit testing). Granted that some of these changes are behind the scenes, but I'm trying to increase the robustness of the interpreter without refactoring it into something completely different. Before I release Tiny Basic 1.2, I still want to add these features: String variables (i.e. a$ -- z$). FOR/NEXT loops Fix known bugs in current version. The work continues...

This blog is about simple computing. I view this from a programmer's rather than a user's perspective. With the BASIC language, though, this line has always been blurred. Simple computing started in 1963 when Kemeny and Kurtz first designed the BASIC language. Here is a scanned PDF of the original Dartmouth BASIC manual. Tools like Liberty Basic and the upcoming Run Basic are the true succesors to Dartmouth BASIC. There is nothing simple about Java, .NET and the tools festering around these platforms. Powerful, yes. Simple, no. Unlike Visual Basic 6 (and its predecessors), there is no attempt to strike a balance between simplicity and power.

Over the past month, I've found several audio interviews with Carl Gundel. If you are interested in a behind-the-scenes look at Liberty Basic and Run Basic, then these are recommended listening: Industry Misinterpretations 22: Liberty Basic with Carl Gundel ( mp3 ). Shareware Radio Podcast: Interview with Carl Gundel ( mp3 ). Enjoy!

Compared to the Sieve benchmarks in previous posts, Tiny Basic is very slow. In fact, it's much slower than I anticipated. I ran Tiny Basic on both the Run Basic public server and Liberty Basic 4.03 on my laptop. Here are the numbers: After 5000, the Run Basic program exceeded the allowable time on the public server. The following is the Sieve program. I had to use IF statements because Tiny Basic doesn't have a FOR/NEXT loop yet. 10 REM sieve2 20 REM ported to Tiny Basic from Liberty Basic by David den Haring 30 REM last updated: 8-14-07 40 REM s -- size, a() -- flags array, a -- start time, z -- end time 50 REM i -- loop counter, p -- prime, c -- prime count, k -- temp 60 s = 7000 : i = 1 70 a = ms 80 IF a(i) > 0 THEN GOTO 300 90 p = (i + i + 3) 100 k = i + p 110 IF k > s THEN GOTO 290 120 a(k) = 1 130 k = k + p 140 GOTO 110 290 c = c + 1 300 i = i + 1 310 IF i > s THEN GOTO 400 320 GOTO 80 400 z = ms 410 PRINT c; 420 PRINT...