Gambas 1.0.17 review

Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clon

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Benoit MINISINI

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Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clone !).

With Gambas, you can quickly design your program GUI, access MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, pilot KDE applications with DCOP, translate your program into many languages, create network applications easily, and so on...

This project aims at making a graphical development environment based on a Basic interpreter, so that we have a language like Visual Basic under Linux.

The phenomenal quantity of bugs and inconsistencies that makes Visual Basic so delightful persuaded me to start this project.

It seems that Microsoft is aware of the poor quality of its language, as VB .Net is not backward compatible with older versions of Visual Basic. I think they have thrown away the Visual Basic interpreter source code, and that VB .Net is just a .Net runtime compiler whose syntax looks like the Visual Basic one. Well, it's just my own opinion...

I want to clear up any misunderstanding immediately. Gambas does not try to be compatible with Visual Basic, and will never be. I'm convinced that its syntax and internals are far better than the one's of its proprietary cousin.

I took from Visual Basic what I found useful : the Basic language, the development environment, and the easiness to quickly make programs with user interfaces.
But I dislike the very bad level of common Visual Basic programmers, often due to bad pratices imposed by the bugs and strangeness of this language. So I will try to make Gambas as coherent, logical and reliable as possible, and I hope that Gambas programmers will make effort in return !

At the moment, I'm looking for programming help. The kernel of Gambas is now stabilized, if not well documented. There is a component example to help people learning how to write components.

I hope other people will join me to help to increase the possibilities of the language. There is so much to do !

Gambas is made up of the following programs :

A compiler.
An interpreter.
An archiver.
A graphical user interface component.
A development environment.

The development environment is written with Gambas itself, so that I can show the abilities of the language. And it is very useful for debugging !