First appeared late 1980s | Designed by Max Reason | |
Developers Max Reason, Eddie Penninkhof Stable release 6.2.3 / 2002; 15 years ago (2002) Preview release 6.3.22 / 2014; 3 years ago (2014) | ||
XBasic is a variant of the BASIC programming language that was developed in the late 1980s for the Motorola 88000 CPU and Unix by Max Reason. In the early 1990s it was ported to Windows and Linux, and since 1999 it has been available as open source software with its runtime library under the LGPL license.
Contents
It should not be confused with TI Extended BASIC, which is sometimes called XBasic or X Basic.
Max Reason discontinued his support, and development since has been overseen by Eddie Penninkhof. Together with a few other enthusiastic programmers, XBasic is slowly being further developed and improved.
Version 6.2.3 is the latest official release, released on 27 October 2002. However, under the guidance and leadership of CW a newer version has been produced, obtainable from the XBasic yahoo groups. (Latest at the time of writing would be 6.3.22) Although primarily coded to keep up with modern Linux distributions, the windows version has been suitably adjusted to keep up with the Linux version.
Characteristics
XBasic has signed and unsigned 8, 16 and 32-bit and signed 64-bit integers as well as 32 and 64-bit floating point values. The string datatype is only for 8 bit characters.
It is possible to generate an assembly language file. XBasic has a Windows only version called XBLite. Development is at SourceForge.