FB began life in the mid-1980s 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. In 1992 and as the next major step after ZBasic version 5, Zedcor Inc., the company of the Gariepy brothers Andy, Mike, Peter and friends based in Tucson, Arizona presented FutureBASIC. In 1995 Staz Software, led by Chris Stasny, acquired the rights to market FutureBASIC. Chris Stasny started this business with an upgraded version, namely FBII, and with his own development, the Program Generator, a CASE tool. The transition from 68k to PowerPC central processing unit 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, was released in September 1999, featuring among many other things a separate compiler application, various open, hence modifiable runtimes, inline PPC assembly, a simplified access to the Macintosh ToolboxApplication Programming Interface, as well as an expanded library of built-in functions. Major update releases introduced a full-featured Appearance Compliant 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 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. In 2007, an independent team of volunteer FB programmers, known as the FBtoC team, developed a translator 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.
Processor and operating system support
System requirements for original Macintosh release: Motorola 68000 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 are much like C or Pascal functions.
They can also be totally insulated from the main program ;
called automatically by FutureBasic built-in event vectors ;
used as cooperative threaded functions.
Specific structures 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 program dim i,num,a$ //These are our variables window 1 //open standard window input "Number of loops "; a$ //BASIC input from user num=val //convert text to number long 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 entered end if do //Wait until Apple-Q HandleEvents until //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. Of note is the DYNAMIC array structures 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$ ; a$. While the FutureBasic language still supports old style variable typing with suffix identifiers, it provides a modern alternative with the as clause: dim b as byte; dim s as short, dim l as long; etc.
Bridges to other languages
AppleScript scripts can be assembled with FutureBasic statements then executed on the fly by a running application. Example:
route _toAppleScript print "return the path to me as string" route _toScreen long if usr ApplescriptRun = _noErr print message$ end if
FutureBasic allows the triggering of UNIX commands. Example:
// print a calendar for 2009 open "UNIX", 1, "cal 2009" dim a$ do line input #1, a$ print a$ until eof close 1
FB allows inline C code. Example:
BeginCFunction // Simple C function to add two integers long simple_add
endC // Define C function so FB can see it toolbox fn simple_add = long // Create little program to add 2 + 2 with the C function window 1 print fn simple_add do HandleEvents until
Limitations
No cross-platform development. This is a Macintosh-only compiler.
FutureBasic supports Macintosh Intel architectures but does not compile on or for any version of Microsoft Windows. and see bottom of page at:
