Re: Euphoria's Future?
Ray Smith wrote:
> What is the future or wxBasic?? What are your
> "current" aims for developing wxBasic??
There are two parts to wxBasic - the Basic interpreter, and the wxWindows
wrappers. Each part is actually independant of each other.
I plan on continuing work on both in the forseeable future. One of the
reasons for releasing it on SourceForge was to get more visibility for the
project. I've been trying to find someone willing to help with a Mac port
(wxWindows runs under the Classic Mac OS and OS X), but so far without any
luck.
> Is your aim to develop a cross platform Visual Basic
> "type" environment?
No, for the moment I'm happy with text-based development. Maybe some time
later I'll consider an IDE. Robin Dunn is in the process of wrapping the
ScITE editor - which supports lots of cool features, like syntax coloring -
into wxWindows. That will be a cool addition for any IDE.
> You also mentioned you would/might add your wx
> wrappers to Euphoria when the Euphoria source is
> available. What incentive is there to do that if
> you have your own interpreter?
I'll certainly attempt it. Not having seen the Euphoria source, I can't
predict how successful I will be.
This whole project started out as an attempt to provide Euphoria with a
cross-platform library. I've been advocating it for some time, and when I
started writing the wxWindows wrappers, I needed *something* to code to.
wxBasic was sort of a stand-in, and it became a project in it's own right.
I've actually written my own version of the Euphoria sequence library, but
it's not especially fun code. Garbage collection permeates everything you
do, and it's unlikely that someone would actually work on the code other
than me. So there's not a lot of point in taking that route.
Plus, if the port goes well, I hope to convince Robert that releasing a
wxWindows enabled version of Euphoria would be a good thing for his
pocketbook. Time will tell.
> How difficult would it be to remove the wxWindows
> logic from the source code and produce a "simple"
> basic interpreter?
As the documentation points out, just compile core.c:
gcc core.c -owxbasic.exe
> Following on from that, how difficult would it be
> to plug in other libraries (like Allegro games library,
> FLTK GUI Library, Fox GUI library for examples) into
> your basic interpreter?
Stuff like Allegro is fairly straight-forward to wrap, because it's a C
toolkit. C++ toolkits are more problematic to wrap.
FTLK and Fox are both C++ toolkits. Not all the other toolkits allow dynamic
creation of controls and assignment of callback at runtime - I vaguely
recall one of those as having that limitation.
Additionally, both FLTK and Fox are emulate controls, rather than use native
controls on their platform. This is - In My Not So Humble Opinion - less
than ideal. Besides, an emulated toolkit version of wxWindows (wxUniversal)
it also availble, currently in alpha stage. So I don't see any of those
toolkits as especially interesting.
The code that I have for wrapping C++ code could probably be adapted for
other libraries, but given the above issues, I don't see any need to do
that.
> How has the response been from the wxWindows community
> regarding wxBasic?
Not enough to make me want to give up my day job. 
Most of the people are C++ coders, so it's not a solution to any problem
they are facing. Calling it pre-alpha probably doesn't help attract people,
either. People who have stumbled on it 'by accident' are pretty positive
about it.
There are a lot of versions of Basic out there, and wxBasic is a fairly
niche sort of thing. Not everyone is interested in cross-platform
capabilities.
Personally, being able to write something like the Minesweeper demo in
Windows, and then have it run with no modification under Linux is Very Cool.
> Does wxBasic have any limitations?
Lots of them, look at shared.h for some of the constants. The documentation
talks about some of them.
It's also given me a lot of ideas I'd like to try out with Euphoria. I think
the release of the Euphoria source code could prove *very* interesting. It
will be interesting to see how difficult it is to change Euphoria's
behavior. For example, I've been itching to add Jiri's associative lists to
Euphoria.
If you have more wxBasic questions, feel free to ask me... Off the Euphoria
mailing list, though.
Thanks.
-- David Cuny
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