WxBasic Implementation

Introduction

You don't need to be an experienced programmer to write applications for both Windows and Linux: thanks to wxWidgets, you can easily write your graphical application with a few lines of BASIC language, using wxBasic.

BASIC is the acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was born in 1963, and became popular on home computers around the 1980's. It is suitable to write any kind of program, and it uses a language structure very similar to "human language". If you want to print "Hello world" on the screen when the variable A is equal to 1, you just have to write:

if a=1 then print "Hello World"

Nothing else is needed, this is a complete BASIC program! Forget all C++ declarations, hinstances, viewports, and dozens of lines to write a program which displays a simple "Hello World" message on the screen. wxBasic can also create stand-alone executable, which will always be long around 1MB (as they actually are the interpreter executable merged to the program source). The only thing you must take in account is that wxBasic will not be very fast: wxBasic exists to make programming faster, and is not very efficient.

Hello World Example

Here's the wxBasic "Hello World" example:

frame = new wxFrame(Null, -1, "wxTextEntryDialog", wxPoint(10,10), wxSize(320,200), wxCAPTION | wxSYSTEM_MENU) 
panel = new wxPanel(frame, -1)
label = new wxStaticText(panel, -1, "Hello World", wxPoint(20,20))
frame.Show(True)

See Also

• all details about how to start from scratch writing wxBasic programs
• Download the latest version of wxBasic from wxBasic Home Page
• WxBasic Tutorial

Development Help Needed

• If someone can port wxBasic to MacOS (Classic and OS-X), BeOS, ArOS and other operative systems, please do (wxBasic needs multiplatform popularity too)
• If someone can port wxWindows libraries to ArOS, which i think is missing, it would be very, very welcome too!