FutureBASIC

History

FB began life in the mid-1980s^[1] as ZBasic, which was created by Andrew Gariepy and envisioned as a cross-platform development system. Before long, the cross-platform aspects were dropped in favor of focusing on Macintosh development. ZBasic acquired a devoted following of developers who praised its ease of use and the tight, fast code produced by the compiler (a legendary labor involving extensive use of hand-built 68K assembly language code). In 1992 and as the next major step after ZBasic version 5^[2], Zedcor Inc., the company of the Gariepy brothers Andy, Mike, Peter and friends based in Tucson, Arizona presented FutureBASIC (later called FBI).^[3] In 1995 Staz Software,^[4] led by Chris Stasny, acquired the rights to market FutureBASIC. Chris Stasny started this business with an upgraded version, namely FBII,^[5] and with his own development, the Program Generator^[6] (PG PRO), a CASE tool.

The transition from 68k to PowerPC central processing unit (CPU) was a lengthy process that involved a complete rewrite of the editor by Chris Stasny and an adaptation of the compiler by Andy Gariepy. The result of their efforts, a dramatically enhanced IDE called FB^3^[7], was released in September 1999^[8], featuring among many other things a separate compiler application, various open, hence modifiable runtimes,^[9] inline PPC assembly, a simplified access to the Macintosh Toolbox Application Programming Interface (API), as well as an expanded library of built-in functions. Major update releases introduced a full-featured Appearance Compliant^[10] runtime written by Robert Purves and the Carbon compliance of generated applications. Once completely carbonized to run natively on the Mac OS X, the FutureBASIC Integrated Development Environment (FB IDE) was called FB4 and first released in July 2004.

Based in Diamondhead, Mississippi, Staz Software was severely hit by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and development pace was slowed at a time when major effort was required to keep the IDE up to date with Apple's evolution towards the Intel-based Macintosh.

More recently, an independent team of volunteer FB programmers developed a translator (FBtoC) that allows FB to generate applications as Universal Binaries through the use of the open source GCC compiler which is included with each copy of Apple's Mac OS X system software.

On January 1, 2008, Staz Software announced that FB would henceforth be freeware and FB4 with FBtoC 1.0 was made available.^[11]

Processor and operating system support

System requirements to create universal binaries with FBtoC: Mac OS X v10.4 or higher, GCC 4.0 or higher, and the Cross-development SDKs must be installed.

Syntax

FutureBasic syntax supports procedural, modular styles of programming using function calls and local variables.

Program flow & structural blocks

User-defined functions (a.k.a. LOCAL FNs in FutureBasic) are much like C or Pascal functions.

They can also be totally insulated from the main program (LOCAL MODE statement);

they allow recursion;

they can be called dynamically at runtime (DEF FN USING statement);

called automatically by FutureBasic built-in event vectors (ON EVENT FN statement);

used as cooperative threaded functions (THREADBEGIN statement).

Specific structures (ENTERPROC/EXITPROC) are used for callback procedures when calling the Macintosh Toolbox.

The language provides the programmer with a complete set of vectors for event-driven applications, such as ON MENU, ON MOUSE, ON DIALOG, ON APPLEEVENT, ON EDIT, ON TIMER, etc.

Other structured keywords include conditional blocks such as:

LONG IF .... XELSE ... END IF

DO .... UNTIL

WHILE ... WEND

SELECT ... CASE... CASE ELSE ... END SELECT

FOR ... NEXT

Legacy BASIC language commands such as: GOTO and GOSUB/RETURN with line numbers and labels - while discouraged - are supported for educational purposes.

An example of a simple program to input a number and display "Hello World" is given below

//Example FutureBasic programdim i,num,a$ //These are our variableswindow 1 //open standard windowinput "Number of loops "; a$ //BASIC input from usernum=val(a$) //convert text to numberlong if num>0 //Structured IF for i = 1 to num //BASIC loop print "hello world" //output text next i //end of loop xelse //Otherwise print "Not today" //no number enteredend ifdo //Wait until Apple-Q HandleEventsuntil ( gFBQuit ) //so that we can see results

Data types

FutureBasic supports complex data types include single and double precision floating points, double length integers, arrays, strings and records (similar to struct in C). Of note is the DYNAMIC array structures (size of memory footprint grows only when used) including DYNAMIC string arrays called INDEX$ and "container" variables which can perform string-like operations on data streams up to 2Gb in size.

C and Pascal borrowed coding styles

Commenting in the code is substantial allowing REMark statements, and C style /* remark */ statements. Sections of code can be bookmarked for easy reference.

Other alternate syntax borrowed from C allows the use of operators such as ++ -- == != += -= || &&

Characters in Pascal strings are accessible much like items of an array: a$[0] (length byte); a$[1] (first character in string a$).

While the FutureBasic language still supports old style variable typing with suffix identifiers, it provides a modern alternative with the as clause: dim b as byte; dim s as short, dim l as long; etc.

Bridges to other languages

AppleScript scripts can be assembled with FutureBasic statements then executed on the fly by a running application. Example:

FutureBasic allows the triggering of UNIX commands. Example:

FB allows inline C code. Example:

Limitations

No cross-platform development. This is a Macintosh-only compiler.

FutureBasic supports Macintosh PPC and Intel architectures but does not compile on or for any version of Microsoft Windows.

No 64bit UI support

As of January 2010, FBtoC v5.4.4 compiles 64bit commandline binaries, but supports only 32bit Carbon UI APIs.