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The aims are painfully high. How do we want to reach this? Read the features we
designed ScriptBasic to have:
- BASIC No question, this is the MOST important feature of ScriptBasic. There are a lot of people who can program BASIC and only BASIC. There are many people, who can not really program. Those who do not really know what programming is, and still: they write their five-liners in BASIC to solve their simple problems. They never write Perl, Tcl, Java or C.
Therefore it is BASIC.
- FREE The interpreter and all other software are distributed under the Lesser GPL licence, which means that the software can be used free of charge even for commercial projects.
- SUPPORTED The software is continuously developing and is actively supported free of charge as well as on commercial base. To get free of charge support subscribe to the ScriptBasic mailing list.
- SCRIPTING language. Variables are typeless. You can store real numbers, integer numbers and strings in any variable. You can mix them and conversion is done automatically.
- PORTABLE Available in C source and can be compiled on UNIXes as well as on Windows NT. There are precompiled binary setup packages from Linux (Debian and RedHat) and for Win32.
- 4E LANGUAGE, which means easy to extend, easy to embed. ScriptBasic was developed to provide clean and clear interfaces around it, and inside it. It is easy to embed the language to an application and use it as a macro language just like TCL. It is also easy to implement new built-in function and new commands. You can develop dynamically loaded libraries that ScriptBasic may load at run time.
- COMPILE BASIC programs can be compiled to standalone executable. ScriptBasic creates pseudo compiled code, which is interpreted afterwards.
- Syntax analysis is done at first and only syntactically perfect programs start to run.
- The compiled code is put into a continuous memory space and compiled code can be saved and loaded again to run without recompilation. This is vital for CGI scripts and is not available for most scripting programming languages.
- Compiled code is binary, not readable. Therefore you can develop and distribute programs and getting some help to protect your intellectual property. You need not give the source code.
- The compiled code can be saved into a text file having C programming language syntax. Compiling this file with a C compiler and linking with the ScriptBasic run-time library you get a standalone binary executable.
- MULTI-THREAD aware. All the code was designed to be thread-safe. You can embed the code into systems that run multiple interpreters in the same process. An example is the Eszter SB Engine variation of the interpreter, which is a standalone http daemon that runs several threads of execution of different BASIC scripts in a single process.
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