Where to get PowerBASIC?

[2-Bit Chip]

Where could I get the PowerBASIC compiler, tools, IDE, manual, documentation/tutorials?

Best regards. :wink

[TmX]

https://www.powerbasic.com/shop/

:wink

[2-Bit Chip]

There would be of no other way to obtain the compiler? I was thinking it would be free. :boohoo:

[hutch--]

Nah, you have to buy this one, its written by hand by an experienced programmer who runs a small company and they have to be able to pay the bills to keep going.

[jj2007]

Nah, you have to buy this one, its written by hand by an experienced programmer who runs a small company and they have to be able to pay the bills to keep going.

See a photo of an experienced programmer
:bg

[hutch--]

Thats find JJ, I never knew Bob had ever posted a photo. He has been around for a long time designing and writing compilers in assemblerand has a decent user base of people who still like to write code in basic.

[GregL]

WTF jj, is his appearance not to your liking or what?  Bob Zale is an experienced programmer, and a damned good assembler programmer too.  PowerBASIC is worth every penny if you ask me. 

Although, I will be reluctant to spend any more money on it unless they offer a compiler that targets x64.  They have always come through before though.

[jj2007]

WTF jj, is his appearance not to your liking or what?  Bob Zale is an experienced programmer, and a damned good assembler programmer too.  PowerBASIC is worth every penny if you ask me.

Greg, I admire Bob for what is doing, that's why I posted the link to the photo. I even bought a license years ago (although I never used it seriously).

[hutch--]

Be careful JJ, we may lead you astray.  :bg

[jj2007]

Be careful JJ, we may lead you astray.  :bg

No such risk, Hutch, I stick to Masm32, and rich PowerMasmBasic :bg

[Vortex]

Does PoweBASIC support static libraries?

[japheth]

Does PoweBASIC support static libraries?

No. It doesn't even know what a linker is. This isn't that bad as it seems at first glance, though, because, as you probably know, BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic bla-bla-bla, and it's a quite good strategy to not confuse noobies with too advanced stuff...

[José Roca]

Static libraries too advanced stuff? What a joke! The compiler for the DOS platform did support them, many, many years ago. That was before we could use DLLs.

[jj2007]

Static libraries too advanced stuff? What a joke!

Hutch, we really need an "attention irony" icon here. Japheth's German humour is too advanced for ordinary human beings :wink

[hutch--]

Thats one of the things on the wish list or if you are an old timer at the PB forum, the "whisch list" but its not a big deal if you know your way around the language. The current two versions solved the last performance problem they has in assembler cde, alignment from 2 to 64 in normal powers of 2.

While MASM as an assembler has far less restrictions in terms of architecture, the great performance item in the 2 compilers is its dynamic string engine and while it can be wasted on sloppy legacy basic code, you can do interesting things with it, hash table of massive size where the unused slots only take up 4 bytes and every item can be changed to the limit of memory is just one of them. It routinely pulls apart string arrays and puts them back together again later and has a very extensive collection of string functions ranging from the old legacy versions to many new ones.

For doing hacky string stuff you can code it that fast that they are viable for write once, run once code and you have the job finished before your competitor has found his/her include files.

The conditional compile directives are reliable and very useful, its macro engine eats C/C++ alive and its DECLARE notation is very well suited for repackaging external function calls in many interesting ways, I have just been wading through the now "known DLL" the old MSVCRT repackaging its function calls into something useful.

There are two things I would like to see in the language, static libraries with a linker and access to module level scope so you can access labels with global visibility and create the bare bones of a procedure, a start label followed after your code with a RETN.

None the less, I have never had any problem writing anything I ever needed with it and it still delivers small code without side by side DLLs, bloat etc ....