Talk:Amiga Basic

Untitled
Sorry, AmigaBASIC was a gimptastic disaster. Here are two facts that I find more than sufficient as a form of circumstantial evidence:

1. Amiga had no memory protection. 2. AmigaBASIC was written by Microsoft.

Some people might say #2 is not necessarily a bad thing and that I'm being biased. If you're really intent on saying that, bring a few instances of their first version of anything nearly as complicated being of few enough bugs that a system with no memory protection wouldn't crash frequently on it (with the idea that they would have developed it without beneift of memory protection alerts as well).

Further there aren't many demonstrations of worthwhile AmigaBASIC based apps. Last one I saw that was close, crashed the whole system like clockwork.

The article could use some upbeat factoids, good luck finding them outside of marketing materials.


 * I wrote a version of the memory game using AmigaBasic around 1990. It was certainly possible to write non-trivial applications with it.  It was a good starting point before I moved onto C.  --Dan East 01:33, 23 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I had a good go at writing a shoot-em-up game using AmigaBASIC in 1990/1991 but it was almost impossible. It was possible to write non-trivial applications using it, but it was a complete chore. I did find the reference manual very well laid out though and it was a good starting point before I moved on to C, if only as it made me appreciate how much nicer and powerful C is! --Jhaselden 10:56, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
 * You just reminded me of Blitz BASIC. I did write a simple action style game in that language.  It was fast enough (and supported direct display access) for action type games.  This article should contain a list of all other BASIC interpreters that were available for the Amiga.  I added Blitz BASIC for starters.  This article needs a piece of sample code.  Perhaps just a simple Hello World app.  My Amiga (and manuals) are packed away, so it's not easy for me to access them.  --Dan East 11:45, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
 * The other BASICs I can remember are AMOS_BASIC_programming_language and Hisoft BASIC. I'll try and dig out some of my old magazines/manuals and see if I can add to that list --Jhaselden 11:26, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Praising other interpreters
I see no problem whatsoever listing other BASIC languages for the Amiga and stating their strengths. AmigaBASIC did certain things well and other things poorly. Languages like BlitzBASIC were very good at graphics work, but not well suited for work within Intuition library. Contrasting AmigaBASIC to other BASIC dialects is not offering "praise" to the other interpreters. It's merely maintaining a balanced POV. --Dan East 12:26, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I know it's an old post, but just to point out, Blitz Basic is actually excellent at using Intuition, with many freeware applications written with it. As well as Intuition, support for directly accessing other libraries (Exec, DOS, ASL, GadTools, even MUI for example), along with the ability to use structs and pointers as in C, makes using any of them easy. In fact, I can't think of any positive points about AmigaBASIC other than the fact it allowed line numbers (is this really a positive?), and that it shipped free with the OS. Daedalus2097 (talk) 14:52, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixing the article
We need to clean this article up and get back to a balanced POV. Obviously some early contributors had something against AmigaBASIC. I'm not saying it was the greatest thing to ever grace the Amiga, however I think the article should better reflect its historic importance as a programming language. The Amiga was so far ahead of its time, both hardware and OS, that I don't think anyone, especially MS, knew how to create a programming language that could properly encapsulate it all. That is essentially part of what a BASIC language is - a simple structural syntax that also transparently exposes methods for accessing APIs. Here are some items I think need to be corrected or added to the article. I'll work on them myself as I have the time. --Dan East 14:30, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
 * As the article already points out, many libraries had to be explicitly loaded and external stub functions defined within BASIC. However, even in Visual Basic (what do you know, Visual Basic's article doesn't have a NPOV either), an extremely matured development environment, programmers still have to do the exact same thing to access 3rd party DLLs.  Not until C# did Microsoft produce a programming language where external libraries could truly be accessed with ease.  So stating that as a negative attribute within the article is not really warranted.  In my opinion, the fact that the language provides that kind of open-ended flexibility at all (the ability to link to any external library) is a very positive thing.  The crux of the issue is that programmers can mature beyond the capabilities of BASIC, in which case they should be using a real language like C.
 * The historical significance of the language. Was it the first to introduce new concepts or constructs?  It was one of the first to do away with line numbers and use labels instead (again, like modern Visual Basic).  It was one of the first basic languages with a built in API for accessing modern GUI elements (dynamic windows, buttons, etc).  It was one of the first steps towards the modern IDE, allowing both the source code and output to be viewed simultaneously with dynamic windows.  I know it was very cutting edge, but was it the first to introduce any of those things?
 * Now in regards to AmigaBasic being shipped "unfinished". Various updates to the language were released, so I think it is fair to assume that if Commodore wished to continue funding improvements to AmigaBasic, those features would have been completed, and the language would have continued to mature.  Obviously Commodore pulled the plug on AmigaBasic pretty fast - it only made it up to Workbench 1.3.  So in that respect I think Commodore is as much to blame as anyone for AmigaBasic's final state.  Obviously AREXX, and its ability to allow inter-application communication, was an extremely powerful thing, and Commodore wanted to concentrate its resources in that area.
 * Version History. The article doesn't even state the date when AmigaBasic was released.
 * This article is a historic article. Nowhere does it take into consideration the state of computing when AmigaBasic was released.  It was very cutting-edge, so it is to be expected that some design decisions would not be optimal.  That is what happens when treading new ground.
 * Screenshots of the IDE.
 * Source code for a Hello World program.
 * Finally, regarding HAM. That is more of a hack than anything else - toggling pixel colors on-the-fly to increase the apparent number of colors.  I'm certain that when Commodore approached Microsoft to create AmigaBasic they specified the exact APIs they wanted exposed.  AmigaBasic was not intended to make graphically intensive games, nor was expected to provide some mechanism to directly access all the custom chips.  It sat on top of intuition.  Just as BASIC is a very high level programming language, its interface to the OS was just as high-level.  Just because I can't easily use Visual Basic to turn the CPU fan of my DELL notebook on does not mean, in and of itself, that the language is incomplete or flawed.  The argument doesn't translate to AmigaBasic either.

This article has now gone from blatant bashing of AmigaBASIC (some of which was written by me) to a lack of detail that completely hides the language's faults and makes it look like the perfect BASIC implementation for the Amiga. The article needs to be expanded with more technical details. J I P | Talk 10:35, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:AmigaBASIC.png
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BetacommandBot (talk) 00:09, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Requested move 21 December 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved, unopposed (closed by non-admin page mover) BegbertBiggs (talk) 22:50, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

AmigaBASIC → Amiga Basic – The form "Amiga Basic" is found in the official manual: https://archive.org/details/AmigaBasic/page/n1/mode/2up. It is also found in some of the further reading in the article. Dan Polansky (talk) 09:07, 21 December 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 08:20, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

(See below)
Some deletionist at some point in the past decided to remove large quantities of information without actually checking the relevance. As a result there's an orphaned reference to two BASIC compilers with the words (See below) after it.

I tried removing it, but apparently removing garbage is "vandalism" according to the people who write bots for this kind of thing, because reasons.

Can someone else who's registered here try to remove those words or else escalate this to someone with the power to overrule malfunctioning vandalism bots?

Ta 2601:584:300:345E:F53B:7E62:1A9D:68EE (talk) 13:45, 3 April 2024 (UTC)