GSoft BASIC Ramble

[Mike Westerfield <MikeW50@aol.com>]

Eric's Shepherd sent an e-mail that caused me to bounce into this
group again. It seemed like quite a coincidence, since BASIC has once
again inserted itself into my life. I thought I'd share some history
and check on interest levels.

I wrote GSoft BASIC when the Apple IIGS was obviously on the way out.
It was partly a labor of love: I had always wanted to complete a set
of languages for the Apple IIGS that included an assembler, Pascal
compiler, C compiler, and BASIC compiler. Even though GSoft was an
interpreter, it sort of closed the set for me. It was also interesting
to try to fit an interpreter into the ORCA environment.

The other reason for writing GSoft was an intent to port the language
to other platforms. At the time, I intended to implement BASIC on Palm
OS, but I got burned on some early forays into that market and never
got around to working on it. A few years ago, though, GSoft became the
basis for BOOST, the scripting language in MediaBlender. Sadly,
MediaBlender seems to have run its course, but BASIC may live on.
BOOST is a candidate for use as a scripting language in AVERT, a
terrorist attack simulator I've been working on for a few years. (See
www.arescorporation.com, and look under Products.)

BOOST is written in Java. As it turns out, it would not be an
insurmountable task to turn BOOST into a stand-alone BASIC for the
Java byte code machine, allowing you to use BASIC to write code that
would run on virtually any platform or browser. I've never been quite
sure if this was a good idea. Is BASIC still welcome in 2008? Would a
non-Jave language really be welcome for the Java JVM? If so, why
haven't other people done it? (All the languages I see for the JVM are
toy languages or ports of scripting languages.) Will people really pay
for compilers these days? I am still not the the point in my career
where I can work for free!

The again, running Lemonade as a Java applet may be reason enough. :)