GFA-BASIC

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Editor in the ATARI ST emulator WinSTon

GFA-BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language , developed by Frank Ostrowski . The first version was completed in 1986 and released for the Atari ST . The programming language for this home computer became very popular in the mid and late 1980s, partly because the ST BASIC that came with the computers was quite buggy and limited. Later ports for the Commodore Amiga , DOS and Windows were also marketed.

Officially, the interpreter and the associated compiler, as sold by GFA-Systemtechnik at the time, are no longer available today. Maintained by small developer communities, there are further developments under the name GFA-Basic.

properties

The language takes like many other modern Basic dialects the control structures of Pascal and C . GFA-BASIC thus allows structured programming and, for example, the waiver of the “Goto” jump command .

The classic line numbers are completely missing and initially only one command was allowed per line. In later versions there was a command separator to accommodate multiple commands on one line. Similar to most other programming languages, “labels”, ie lines that contain a jump label name, are used as jump labels.

As in Pascal, subroutines are defined as procedures and functions, whereby functions, unlike procedures, have a return value. Both accept parameters, either by value or by reference transfer. Local variables are also possible.

With GFA-Basic for Windows 32-bit, the data types include the simple types: Boolean , Byte , Short , Card, Integer , Long , Handle , Large, Float , Single , Pointer , Currency, Date , String , Fixed-Length-String, Variant ; Structures (= types) can also be defined.

Editor and interpreter are a single program that reports errors during programming and completes commands. A run-only interpreter can execute the source code independently of the built-in interpreter. The GFA compiler for GFA-Basic generates faster, executable programs from the source code.

Trivia

  • Version 3.x for Windows also enables single-line case distinctions and the definition of multi-line functions.
  • A free version for projects up to 1000 lines was sometimes a. available through Data Becker's “Golden Series”, at least in Germany.
  • With access to the Windows API, the 16-bit version for Windows 3.x can still be used to write and compile programs that can run on old 32-bit Windows systems.

history

Since 1986 , there are also versions for MS-DOS , Windows and Amiga - operating systems . For Windows from Windows 3.0 onwards there is a 16-bit interpreter and compiler as well as a 32-bit interpreter and compiler with which compact executable files can be generated.

GFA-Basic was very widespread in the most successful years of the Atari ST , not least because of the comfortable editor for the time, which introduced innovations such as code folding . Because of the unclean system libraries from the operating system point of view and the development environment not integrated into the usual GEM user interface, GFA-Basic lost its popularity in the mid- 90s in favor of TurboC , PureC and Modula-2 .

Development on the ATARI side was officially discontinued after version 3.6 TT, but continued by committed programmers without knowledge of the source code, as the library modules were gradually exchanged and the interpreter and the IDE were binary patched. The unofficial and final independent further development of the GFA development package is the RUN! Lib, the RUN! Only interpreter of RUN! Software and GBE from ENCOM .

GFA-Basic was made available as a 16-bit (last version: 4.38) and a 32-bit version (last version: 2.30 from July 25, 2001) for programming under Windows.

Since the end of 2002 GFA Software Technologies has stopped responding to orders and customer inquiries. In summer 2005 the official mailing list was switched off without prior notice.

Since the end of 2006, a small group has been developing the Windows version (32-bit). At Google, new pages were created especially for GFA-BASIC 32 and GFA-BASIC 16.

See also

literature

Web links

Extensive collections of programming examples are freely available for the Atari and Windows versions:

The Windows versions: there are corresponding downloads of the interpreter as well as new information, patches, software etc.

Converter program for GFA-WIN 16-bit sources to VB.Net