Friday, May 18, 2007

What is this all about?

Let me introduce my self. My name is Dave, and I have been in the microcomputer industry in one form or another since 1974 [wow!]. During that time I have witnessed the rapid evolution of personal computers from 250lb power hungry light dimming behemoths, to the pocket pc of today.

For the most part I have been a slave to Windows and Visual Basic for a majority of the programming I have done on the PC. That is about to change. I have become fed up with "Uncle Bill" and his friends in Redmond, and have decided that "VISTA" is the last straw.

Starting in about a month, I will begin the switch from Microsoft Windows powered machines to the Apple Mac and OSX.

My first major venture into programming in the world of OSX will be of all things... a Basic compiler. Yes I know.... there are a few out there already. Objective-Basic being the one that seems to be getting the most coverage lately. However I feel that ObjBas lacks a lot, so I am going to try a totally different approach.

My Basic Objectives [pun intended]
1) retain as much of the syntax of VB6 as possible
2) make the compiler powerful enough to compile itself
3) create GUI forms without Interface Builder [not sure about this one]


The first version [already under developement] will actually be written in VB6 on a Windows computer. Once objective #2 is met, development will transition totally to the OSX environment.

Any comments, suggestions, ideas etc... are welcome.

Also... I need a catchy name for this future product!!

1 comment:

Andrew J. Brehm said...

I am a Mac user since 1999 (BeOS just before) and I like Vista.

It has become more Mac-like. They renamed a few directories in a Mac-ish way ("Documents and Settings" became "Users"). Ts a little bit more logical ("Users" is shared as Vista, like Mac OS X, assumes that users will keep and access their data in their home directories now). And Vista has increased the focus on .NET rather than Win32. And I like .NET, its classes, Visual Studio, and its portability.

A VB-like language for Cocoa? Well, there is REALbasic (Carbon), which can import VB6 source and compiles for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Why create another one?

GUI "forms" (Windows lingo?) are created within REALbasic's own IDE.

I use REALbasic for home projects, while I work with C# and Visual Basic .NET in my professional capacity.

REALbasic is similar enough to Visual Basic to make switching between the two easy enough.

If only I could use one simple code base for both .NET and self-contained compiled binaries!