Power Basic

Michael Kingsford Gray

Hewlett-Packard Rocky Mountain BASIC.

Bob G Beechey

Power Basic is a further development of Borand's Turbo Basic and was a compiler while GWBasic and Visual Basic were still interpreted at that time. QuickBasic stole some of its thunder. MUSAC, a student management system that is widely used in New Zealand, was originally written in Power Basic (based on an original, simpler system written for a TRS-80). Power Basic is available as Windows and DOS or console compilers. It is a fully developed and consistent form of traditional Basic syntax. A visual designer module for Windows GUI apps is available. If you loved QuickBasic or GWBasic in their day, I recommend Power Basic as a modern, fully supported, and powerful modern equivalent that can create useful applications. Although it might be argued you should really get over it... (I have not actually used Power Basic since v3.0 back in the early 90s).

Kevin Bewley

Slightly OT but I used to use AMOS basic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOS_(programming_language)[^] on my Amiga - it was awesome! Anyone else remember this one?

mohamedali01

I loved the Qbasic, especially version 3.x that compiles exe files not the ver 1.1 that comes with DOS. Oh Dear, I'm getting old already :) though i didn't reach 30

ScottM1

I remember it coming with Windows '95 too.

Darin McGee

It has really grown up, ultra fast, small and no runtime library needed. Compiles to native machine code. They have a console version and a Windows GUI version, both come with GUI editors. I use it all the time for system management apps. They also have a SQL library for sale that is good and works with just about any SQL database as long as you have an ODBC driver for it.

Gregori Harbs

ha, yeah i heard it still too based on 16bits... but i'm particulary came from QB and now i'm using freebasic instead that for me is the perfect mix between easy of use of QB (aside the fact that its a compiler not a programming environment) but meh, for me powerbasic is too hackish, so i say power but not as powerful as freebasic, that i love so much (maybe a little biased, but whaaatever :P) have fun :)

John Rayfield

I started using the DOS version of PowerBASIC back in the late 80's or around 1990. I used it to develop some commercial applications. I started with QuickBasic and very quickly outgrew it (ran out of memory for my programs to run). So I switched to Microsoft's Professional Basic, which was great. But then along came PowerBASIC, and I never looked back. Of course, that's 'ancient history' when it comes to computers and programming languages. Now, PowerBASIC is available in a Console Compiler version as well as a Windows version. The Windows version now includes object capabilities (if you want to use them, but you don't have to), threading, and many functions that are typical of C or C#. But the syntax is still like "basic", instead of the more-cryptic style of syntax like C or C#. There are some very nice 3rd party tools that have been developed to work with PowerBASIC, to further enhance it's capabilities and/or make it easier and faster to develop applications. For example, EZ-GUI is a development tool that includes a visual designer as well as a library of hundreds of functions, many of which would be accessible in PowerBASIC through the Windows API, but EZ-GUI makes them much easier to use. In a nutshell, PowerBASIC isn't even close, in my opinion, to what it started out as. It's much much more advanced than that. For me, where I learned 'procedural' programming (and I've done some assembly-language programming for embedded systems, too), using PowerBASIC is much easier than languages like VB.Net. For someone who learned objected-oriented programming first, I suspect that PowerBASIC won't be their 'favorite' language.

John Rayfield, Jr.

Chris Boss

I have been using PowerBasic for over ten years. PowerBasic is what C should have been. It produces comparibly fast and small (compact) executables as C, but it is BASIC. It sticks to the long time Microsoft BASIC syntax so QBasic, PDS 7.1 and VB programmers will find it very familiar. The command set is very rich, especially when it comes to variable length strings. It is also very low level with things like code pointers, variable pointers, pointer indirection (pointer to a pointer), inline assembler. It also does COM objects and Classes, but you can still write an app in 100 procedurally based code. It does require a good working knowledge of the WIN32 API's. The online forums provide access to some very advanced WIN32 programmers around the world. I am a third party developer who provides addons to PowerBasic and my tools also were all built using PowerBasic. Unlike Visual Basic of the past where quality addons usually were built using C or C++, PowerBasic addons are often built using PowerBasic itself. I built an advanced GUI engine for use with PowerBasic and I have designed everything from drag and drop Visual Designers to things like custom controls with things like a 2D proprietary Sprite engine, 3D OpenGL based scripting language and more. I do stuff like subclassing, superclassing, low level DIB's, threading and more all written in PowerBasic. You can build apps which can fit on a floppy disk (remember those ?). No dot.net runtimes required. No software bloat.

Chris Boss

Remember TurboBasic ? Borland progressively got rid of their compiler business, first was TurboBasic (not because it was bad, but just hard to compete against Microsofts QuickBasic and PDS 7.1) and then later sold off all their programming languages. TurboBasic was sold back to its original developer, Bob Zale, and he renamed it PowerBasic. Without the resources of a big software company PowerBasic had to grow slowly, first marketing itself as an addon to Visual Basic for building real DLL's. Today it has come a long way and has a nice array of third party tools as addons. PowerBasic 10 (for Windows) and a real 32 bit compiler. The compiler itself, is not written in a higher language like C++, but it is written in pure assembler (IDE for it is written in PowerBasic). The compile speeds are just amazing. The execution speed of the compile code is also very, very fast and on par with any C compiler today. The command set is extremely rich, with things like Matrix (ARRAY) commands, fast string functions, rich data types, macros, compiler directives, debugger, register variables, pointers, inline assembler, Dynamic Dialog Tools command set and more. It comes with a PowerBasic translation of the Windows API headers and you have access to the entire array of WIN32 APIs. It also does COM and its own version of classes (OOP if you like it). You need not be an OOP programmer though, since you can write an app using 100% procedural based code. Since BASIC is a more natural language is more readable then say C++, Windows API code is actually quite readable and learning the Windows API is not as difficult for PowerBasic programmers as it might be for a C programmer. Simply put, PowerBasic is a professional level tool. Unlike something like Visual Studio which requires a couple gigabytes to install, a complete PowerBasic installation is about 10 meg. On about a 9 year old Windows XP computer (2.5 ghz Celeron CPU, 768 meg RAM) I can compile about 63,000 lines of code in less than 10 seconds. On a modern computer such compiles would be almost instantaneous.

JimDunn

RogelioP EX DE HL

Power Basic. Had a brief stint with it back in the later part of the 80s for college projects, took it as decidedly better than GWBasic, Basica and Quick Basic on the MSDOS realm. The affair didn't last long, after learning it and doing a few things I shelved the environment; I was already spoiled with the power of Microware's (now Radisys) OS-9 RTOS and its Basic offering -> BASIC-09 [^], tried and true it was more than enough for what I needed to accomplish :cool: -- RP

Frederick J Harris

PowerBASIC is the other half of my coding arsenal - the rest of it being C and C++. Given a choice, I'll use PowerBASIC before I'll use C or C++, and I'm equally skilled in either coding environment. Where I can't readily use PowerBASIC is in non desktop Windows environments, for example Windows embedded or CE. For Windows desktop development I'll always go with PowerBASIC. Speed wise, its equivalent to C. If you're into asm, it has its own inline assembler. If you're into using the Windows Api as I am, you have the same access to it as you have with C or C++. The place where it kills C or C++ is in string handling. There is nothing like have a string type built right into the compiler. For this reason it produces much smaller executables than C++ which must essentially compile some string library or other into the executable. The only way you can produce a smaller executable is to use C with no string class, i.e., use the low level strcpy type string buffer primitives. Also, it has easy support for COM; both high level and low level. All in all, its dynamite.