Embracing, extending but not extinguishing yab

clasqm

This is a call for discussion.

I believe that we do need an easy entryway into RenkuOS development. We have yab, and for now that will do. But in the longer run, we need something of our own.

Yab was forked from yabasic many years ago. But yabasic has not stood still. For example, it can now directly use C libraries. That sort of development never made it into yab.

I have successfully compiled the latest yabasic to run in Haiku, although the "graphic-window" remains a problem. But with a little [cough] external [cough] assistance, I think it would be possible to create a new dialect of BASIC that is

Unique to RenkuOS
backwards-compatible with yab, at least for now
based on the latest version of yabasic, and easily patched to match new yabasic versions.
able to create both CLI and GUI programs (ncurses compiled back in)
Interpreter-only. The circumstances that created two forms of pseudo-compilation don't exist any more. That was a different software universe. It will be easy enough to create a little C++ stub launcher if it is important that every program shows up under its own icon in the Deskbar.
supplied with its own IDE
and with better documentation. To have the yab and yabasic commands in different documents after all these years is becoming a bit ridiculous.

Code name: RenkuBASIC

ilfelice

I like the idea. I say, go for it!

Akakor

I like it, but I would like to be able to compile it to an executable too (no pseudo compilation).

dataflowcodes

I loved BASIC back in the day but it is so clumsy nowadays. Something high-level is needed but not derived from YABASIC. Bulky as it is, Python is better. What else can we use?

clasqm

dataflowcodes I loved BASIC back in the day but it is so clumsy nowadays. Something high-level is needed but not derived from YABASIC. Bulky as it is, Python is better. What else can we use?

Clumsy? That is a stylistic critique. To be clear, I don't care what the code looks like, if it looks "elegant" or "modern", I want apps that work, and a language simple enough to write those apps.. Yab has a track record, all it needs is a little love.

Python and the BeOS/Haiku/RenkuOS API have a long and tortuous history, full of false starts. If you care to pick that up and run with it, I will be the first to applaud your work. BASIC and Python don't need to be enemies.

Akakor I like it, but I would like to be able to compile it to an executable too (no pseudo compilation).

Why? yab/RenkuOS is suitable for making small apps. You're not ever going to write an MS-Office or GIMP replacement in yab/RenkuOS, it would be the wrong tool for the job. The small GUI front-end to a CLI command is yab's natural habitat.

When Yabasic was created we were coming off the shareware era, and people still thought they would get rich from their hobby. and software was distributed on CD-ROMs. Yes, it is that old. So yabasic offered "binding" as a way to distribute your program without requiring that people have yabasic on their systems. "Binding", btw is essentially the same thing you can do with the makeselfscript to make .run files. It's not real compilation, with a hex editor you can tear it apart and get at the source code. The BuildFactory is not much better. If either of these provided a significan speed boost, then the official yab IDE would be provided in that form. But it's not: the IDE is a plain-text script fed to the interpreter. With packaging it is now dead-simple to specify the interpreter as a dependency.

What else on Haiku comes as an interpreter? Python. Perl. Ruby. Why, it's almost as if compilation is going out of fashion 😀 .

If we did insist on compilation, the place to start would not be yabasic but BaCon. I've worked in BaCon. It is quite powerful, with keywords rare in other dialects. But it spits out two sets of error codes. First BASIC errors, that's clear enough, But you can write perfect BASIC that simply won't work in the C code it transpiles to, and then you get C error messages, which you then have to figure out how it can be fixed back on tthe BASIC side. Not user-friendly.