| Q: | What is XBasic? |
| A: | XBasic is a comprehensive program development environment that integrates an editor, compiler, debugger, graphical user interface, and GuiDesigner into a seamless working environment that encompasses the whole process of creating fast, efficient, reliable programs. |
| Q: | Sounds a little like Microsoft QuickBasic or VisualBasic. What's the difference? |
| A: | Quick Basic and Visual Basic are essentially toy languages, underpowered for serious projects. On the other hand, XBasic is a professional programming tool, appropriate for all kinds of programming, including large, sophisticated programs. |
| Q: | For instance, what could you write in XBasic, but not QuickBasic or VisualBasic? |
| A: | For one thing, all of XBasic, and the whole program development environment, including GuiDesigner are written in XBasic, and the GUI is pure GuiDesigner. |
| Q: | Amazing! I thought sophisticated programs like XBasic were always written in C or C++. |
| A: | Almost all are - and for good reason. No program as sophisticated as XBasic has ever been written in any variety of BASIC before because until XBasic, it couldn't be done. |
| Q: | Why not? |
| A: | Because only XBasic has the power, flexibility, and efficiency necessary to implement sophisticated programs like this. Naturally you could write XBasic in C or C++. |
| Q: | Then why should anyone consider XBasic? |
| A: | Because it's alot easier to program in XBasic. Not only because its development environment is spiffy, but because the language is much easier to understand and read. |
| Q: | So all programmers should switch to XBasic? |
| A: | I don't tell programmers what they should do. |
| Q: | But should they? |
| A: | I'd like to see that, of course, but it'll never happen. And really, it shouldn't happen. For those programmers who have really wired C or C++, it's not a clear call on whether they'd be better off switching to XBasic. They've already learned C or C++, so the fact that XBasic is alot easier to learn doesn't help them much. Still, since XBasic programs are alot easier for other programmers to read, or yourself after a time, it's still worth considering. |
| Q: | To become powerful, did XBasic have to sacrifice simplicity and add pointers, malloc(), etc? |
| A: | Absolutely not. X Basic is easier to learn and read than conventional BASIC. First, all the garbage that accumulated over the generations was tossed out. What remained was streamlined, enhanced, and designed as a full-bore, no holds barred 32/64-bit language. |
| Q: | XBasic is 32-bit? |
| A: | That's right. Go ahead, dimension million element arrays. No problem. |
| Q: | No more "out of memory" or "insufficient string space". |
| A: | Not only that, it means you can stop wasting your time trying to work around the memory limitations of QuickBasic, VisualBasic, and all other languages with 16-bit architecture. |
| Q: | So XBasic only runs on WindowsNT. |
| A: | Not at all. It runs on Windows 3.1 too - and Windows95, Linux, and SCO UNIX. |
| Q: | How's that possible? |
| A: | Programs that run on the "Win32s" subset of WindowsNT will also run on Windows 3.1. That's because Win32s, a DLL set provided by Microsoft, sits between WindowsNT programs and Windows 3.1 and translates API calls back and forth between 16-bits and 32-bits. |
| Q: | So XBasic is for WindowsNT and Windows 3.1. That's great! |
| A: | That's not all. At this time XBasic also runs on Data General Aviion computers, which are based on Motorola 88100 CPUs, and... |
| Q: | Wait! That a UNIX system... |
| A: | That's right. XBasic will become available on a wide variety of platforms in the next 2 years. |
| Q: | Including OS/2 ? |
| A: | XBasic reportedly runs on OS/2 Warp. |