Developers Jump On Java Bandwagon

Use of Visual Basic has dropped 35% since the spring, says a poll of more than 430 North American developers done by research company Evans Data Corp.

Lemick

Though Lemick syntax is based on BASIC it is not a reimplementation of some flavor of BASIC neither it tends to conform to some standards. Lemick supports object-oriented programming yet it is not a purely object-oriented language. Most of the traditional BASIC constructs, such as If, Do, Select and etc., are present in Lemick. However everything related to input/output, user interface, networking and similar is defined in the packages and is not part of the language itself. Althought it was one of the major design ideas to keep the core language compact and to provide powerful constructs for the extension of the language through packages and native code, the source code is'nt so neat. Lemick uses a virtual machine (VM) and has the run-time which translates VM assembler into a native platform code. Lemick run-time tries to be highly efficient. The author declares that it is ten to hundred times faster then popular interpreters, for example, Perl or Python. And it is just slightly slower then the recent Java JIT-based run-times. To support object-oriented programming Lemick provides classes, interfaces, single inheritance, virtual methods and safe dynamic casting. Lemick provides structured exception handling support. Exceptions are full objects and exception handlers can be attached to blocks of code (Try-Catch-Finally) or to objects, classes and exceptions.

Web site: http://lemick.sourceforge.net/

KPL

KPL (Kids Programming Language) is structured language modeled on the simplicity and readability of BASIC. KPL was developed to teach children programming but do not consider it a primitive language. KPL ia a full featured language with an excellent IDE. The IDE has color syntax highlighting, run-time trace messages, tooltip help messages, tabbed window, code management, etc. KPL offers all the tipical instructions, functions and statements of traditional Basic improved with concepts of modern languages such as methods and user-defined structures. KPL does not have a GUI editor. As KPL borned to be a teaching language, graphic interfaces must be drawn by scratch. The same thing happens for mouse management: the programmer must tell the mouse where is the button. Do you remember ancient times when mouse funtions had to be coded in QuickBasic like this (X1,Y1)-(X2-Y2)? KPL requires .NET 1.1 and does not build EXEs but it may convert immediately the code to C# or VB.NET sources so to be compiled with these languages.

Web site: http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/

KoolBasic

Koolbasic is now definitively a Basic IDE for Rapid-Q. The Koolbasic official site has disappeared and actually any reference to the name 'Koolbasic'. Look at SourceForge.

KBasic

The goal of KBasic is to offer a simple, intuitive and fast programming language for Windows and Linux which the programmer could be already familiar with. The language is very similar to Visual Basic with some elements of Java. The user may program in the old Quick Basic syntax without effort. KBasic has a visual IDE where the programmer may draw forms and drop controls in a Visual Basic style. The language offers all the main commands, functions and statements, and it's a full programming environment. The language is well structured and the source code is neat and tidy. But there are some issues to consider. At present the language and particularly the programming IDE is not stable. It hangs often without any warning. I had to play with it a while to make a primitive GUI program. The working environment is unusual: backgrounds that changes randomly at every start-up made with pictures grabbed from DVD cases, animations in the toolbar and music that should accompany the programmer during is his work. The Help contains lot of informations. There's a Content guide, a language reference and also a KBasic book, but many parts are still written in German and this doesn't help the new user. Every item described inside the Guide has a helpful example, there are also links to files with the relative source code but many of these are not present so the links don't work.

Web site: http://www.kbasic.org/

Just Basic

Just BASIC is a free Basic based on a subset Liberty BASIC. The developer is the same of Liberty Basic. Just BASIC has passed the beta stage and now it's available version 1.0.1.

Web site: http://www.justbasic.com/

iBasic

Powerfull programming language, it produces very small stand alone EXE files. One of its characteristics is the ability to include directly in the source code Assembly code. The working environment is simple: there is no editor that help the programmer create GUI applications, but drawing an interface is really easy. iBasic has all the major controls as text-boxes, buttons, radio buttons, combo boxes, list boxes, check boxes, etc. It supports also DirectX libraries to manage sprite operations. iBasic comes in two versions Standard and iBasic Professional.

Web site: http://www.pyxia.com/