Simple Computing

Jerry Muelver of Hytext Consulting has launched the first Run Basic Hosting Service . Account features include: Dedicated Run Basic server. Secure folder with FTP access. Static IP address. A subscription is $60 for 6 months ($10/month). Jerry just announced a $5, 1-month trial.

A competitor to Liberty Basic from across the pond entered my radar in recent months. It's called BBC Basic for Windows and it's maintained by Richard T. Russell -- a sort of British Carl Gundel. I was sufficiently impressed to buy a license and try it out as a testing tool for a project. BBC Basic has a rich history that involves the BBC Micro and Acorn computers. The history of Acorn Computers parallels that of famous American companies like Apple and Commodore . BBC Basic for Windows is a little more complicated than Liberty Basic, but it is also much faster and more powerful. I'll post updated Sieve benchmarks comparing Liberty Basic, Run Basic and BBC Basic in coming weeks. Liberty Basic and Run Basic were developed with different tools and differing philosophies: Liberty Basic was written in Smalltalk and has some of Smalltalk characteristics like big strings and really big integers. To understand what I mean, open a workspace in Squeak Smalltalk and evaluate the...

There are two new podcast interviews of Carl Gundel by the guys at Cincom Smalltalk. Just in case you've missed some previous posts, Carl is the author of Liberty Basic (for Windows) and the new Run Basic (for the web). In both interviews, Carl discusses Run Basic: Industry Misinterpretations Episode 70: Run Basic, Run! Industry Misinterpretations Episode 71: Run Basic, Run! (Part 2)

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...