I used to Dabble a little using Dark Basic Professional, a rather nice Gui 
front end Basic  mainly aimed at writing 'games'. 
A couple of my friends teenage boys enjoyed messing with it as it was very easy 
to code and results came quickly.

This is worth a read for those interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DarkBASIC  

Neil

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Usher
Sent: 23 February 2012 10:40
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Ql-Users] Nascent project: Cross-platform SuperBASIC derivative.

The Raspberry Pi project and my work at Oxford University supporting a science 
department has had me thinking for some time about  the need for a modern 
equivalent to the old home computer systems and the BASIC language which came 
on them.

On the home computer front, as shown in the second episode of the BBC's 
"Electric Dreams", teenage boys are still enthused by being able to program, as 
long as within 15 minutes they can start annoying their family with sounds and 
putting their name on the screen in gaudy colours. Plotting things on the 
screen simply is also important. The energy barrier must not be very high.

On the scientific front, there are many people who need to do some programming 
but find the energy barrier for learning traditional programming languages (and 
even Matlab) too steep. They need a simple language with which to process data 
and plot their data in a publishable quality format.

To this end, I see SuperBASIC as a very good starting point, which needs to be 
extended with modern data structures such as compound variables and proper 
variable scoping.

I've been thinking about this quite hard in the last few days and have written 
up my initial thoughts on my blog:

        http://www.lingula.org.uk/wordpress/2012/02/23/notsobasic/

Any comments and possible help appreciated. ;-)

Steve
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