I have just started writing a screen saver using FreeBasic. I have discovered that contrary to the developer documentation FreeBasic is not compatible with QuickBasic. I have been programming with QuickBasic for years, most recently with the QB4.1 IDE. It develops console based applications. The most notable feature that I missed when programming FreeBasic was the simplicity of the OPEN statement in QuickBasic. Freebasic uses the longer more verbal version and does not understand (or attempt to understand) the older syntax. Also the command line access of FreeBasic is more like C’s syntax using ARGV and ARGC losing the simplicity of the COMMAND$ keyword containing the text passed on the command line. This will allow for quicker command line parsing, but with my screen saver I only need to know the second text character passed on the command line. MID$(COMMAND$,2,1) gave this to me in the past. Now I need a much longer routine to retrieve this one character. Maybe I’ll learn freebasic, or maybe I’ll continue to write console programs in QB4.5 and use my other old program Clarion 4 for Windows to write my Windows applications. I’m still dabbling with Linux programming and FreeBasic does have a functional compiler for Linux which just may sway my choice. I’ll decide after I test FreeBasic on Linux. It might be nice to have the same tool for both Windows and Linux (Make them compatible???)
