Over 30 years ago, when I discovered BASIC, spaghetti code and GOTO were history . The modern BASIC dialects around 1985 had all the if elseif else endif select repeat until do loop while wend etc stuff that you need for structured programming. And speedwise, the GfaBasic compiler at the time beat ...

Hmm, so he abandoning Pascal for C because C has a goto statement? I never liked C syntax with its tendency to use every shifted character on the keyboard. This is a crazy system to everyone whoever had a typing course and knows that shifted characters(two-finger) are harder to make than a short wo...

Hmm, so he abandoning Pascal for C because C has a goto statement? Certainly not. If you read the paper, most of it covered loop techniques and the ability to exit them with statements like 'break' and 'leave'. The 'goto' variant was briefly mentioned as a programming practice of the past and to il...

for a compiler back-end I prefer an assembler without those kind of built-in functions that make it look like a cross-breed HLL. No compiler back-end here, I use Assembly standalone. For the 5% of coding that I do with FreeBasic, I use an IDE programmed entirely in Assembly. Over 20k lines of code ...

marcov wrote:I'm more a Basm/Tasm person

I did some TASM in the 90s. I should still have a copy of TASM 5.0 lying around somewhere. It is still installed on my 386sx (with 16MB RAM).

it is said that NASM's macro support is very powerful Yes, NASM coders say that. Try to implement something simple like Print Str$("The single: %f\n", MySingle), Str$("The double: %f\n", MyDouble), Str$("The integer: %f\n", MyInt) in NASM. A major advantage of NASM is ...

No higher language should be compared to ASM. It is unavoidable that higher languages have more commands because they are designed to be an abstraction (such as the definition of types) that makes it easier for programmers to get the job done (arguably some HLL's may be more successful in this than...

Yes, I heard that before, that FPC is being maintained with Lazarus in mind these days. I think with any of these free* projects, maintenance is a big issue. If you look at FB header files, some are also very much out-of-date.

marcov wrote:Pascal stores the declaration part in a separate file, and even parts from the compilation that are used directly.

I think one of the issues with (Free)Basic is that it doesn't have a clear declaration part. Pascal is more structured in this respect, which gives its compiler an advantage.

i don't see very much bigger simplicity in using masm Masm as a language is neither simple nor complex. The learning curve is a bit steep, but you can get along with a few dozen instructions, like mov, add, inc, sub etc. Compare that to the 1000+ commands of C++. No higher language should be compar...

Not always simple to know if a call is hidden or not behind a name. #define say_a_complex_expression_with(x) A.x namespace A dim shared as integer x = 33 Allowing ambiguous situations like that is a source of big trouble, not just for the compiler but for a programmer/maintainer of such code as wel...

Replacing the stack references, when uinteger is involved in a comparison, the C compiler (which is what FB translates to) uses the jump-not-below instruction (in this particular case):

What do other basics do in such case? QuickBASIC did not have word types. In order to represent 0 to 65535 type LONG had to be used. FreeBASIC simply seems to adopt the C way and there isn't much choice if C is used as back-end. I don't see why? FB could issue the relevant casts/conversions to infl...

marcov wrote:What do other basics do in such case?

QuickBASIC did not have word types. In order to represent 0 to 65535 type LONG had to be used. FreeBASIC simply seems to adopt the C way and there isn't much choice if C is used as back-end.

fxm wrote:See Coercion and Conversion in documentation.

Thanks for the link.