TenUnusualThingsAboutLB

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Alyce Alyce Apr 30, 2015 - "Deleted Page"

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Ten Interesting, Unusual, or Unique Things about Liberty BASIC - Alyce There are some things common to all BASIC languages, but Liberty BASIC includes some fantastic, unusual and unique features. Liberty BASIC is listed amongst the major implementations of BASIC on Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC One: Books in Print! There are several books about Liberty BASIC programming. Wallace Wang, author of many computer books rewrote his popular book " Beginning Programming for Dummies " to teach Liberty BASIC! Greg Perry, author of the international bestseller "QBasic by Example" rewrote his book " Sams Teach Yourself Beginning Programming in 24 Hours " to teach Liberty BASIC. Carl Gundel, the author of the Liberty BASIC programming language is the author of “ Beginning Programming with Liberty BASIC.” It is available here: Two: Interactive Tutorial Liberty BASIC comes with an interactive tutorial presented through a tool called the lesson browser. It allows you to learn to program in Liberty BASIC step-by-step by reading the lesson, viewing the code and running the code – all on the same page! You can even modify the code and run it again to see how it works and determine your level of understanding. If that weren't enough, you can write your own lessons using the lesson browser! Three: Commands sent in quoted text. Some languages require you to give commands and make statements using esoteric formats. Liberty BASIC gives you the ability to write your programs in simple English. Four: Graphics Drawing Segments Liberty BASIC provides many drawing commands. You can draw circles, boxes, ellipses, lines, pie shapes... the list goes on and on. Many programming languages allow graphics, of course. Liberty BASIC is unusual because it allows you to group sequences of drawing commands into “segments” and redraw all of the objects in a segment with a single statement. Five: Console or GUI programming; your choice! Old-style BASICs like GW-BASIC and Qbasic were limited to a console that allowed the programmer to display messages to the user. The user typed responses and hit the ENTER key. The program then responded accordingly, and so it went. Newer BASICs like Visual Basic provided graphical user interfaces, which is a fancy way of saying the program consisted of windows containing controls like buttons, text boxes, menus, etc. The program responded when the user interacted with these controls. In Liberty BAISC, you can create an old-style console program in a single text window (called the main window) with ease. You can also easily create GUI programs that consist of windows containing buttons, textboxes and other standard controls. Six: Easy Game Engine! Liberty BASIC lets you program 2-D games using very easy commands. Games appear against background images which can be scrolled in various directions. Figures called sprites are placed on the background image. These sprites can be moved, scaled and can contain multiple images to create animations. There is automatic collision detection to alert the programmer when two sprites touch one another. This article cannot do justice to the large number of game features available in Liberty BASIC. Seven: Customizable GUI Designer Liberty BASIC comes with a GUI designer that allows you to lay out windows and controls visually, then create the code to replicate what you see. Many languages incorporate a visual designer, but Liberty BASIC includes the code for this designer, so you can customize it as you wish. It is called FreeForm. Eight: Code like a Pro! Liberty BASIC Pro is an upgrade to Liberty BASIC that allows you to work with projects, save multiple versions of your code and compare them quickly, and it has performance and formatting tools. Learn more here: Liberty BASIC Pro Nine: Web Programming There is a special version of Liberty BASIC called Run BASIC. It allows you to do web programming. You can read about it, try examples, and even write and run your own code here: Run BASIC Ten: Longevity! Liberty BASIC by Carl Gundel of Shoptalk Systems has been in existence since 1992! That means twenty-three years of continuous support and development, which is highly unusual these days. Ten Interesting, Unusual, or Unique Things about Liberty BASIC | One: Books in Print! | Two: Interactive Tutorial | Three: Commands sent in quoted text. | Four: Graphics Drawing Segments | Five: Console or GUI programming; your choice! | Six: Easy Game Engine! | Seven: Customizable GUI Designer | Eight: Code like a Pro! | Nine: Web Programming | Ten: Longevity!