ThinBasic - use for Psyc research on the web/tablet via Adobe Alchemy?

[andytwoods]

Hi there,

I am looking for a script based language that Psychologists can use to create research experiments, which will then be placed on the web/tablet. The plan would be to embed the interpreter in Adobe Alchemy (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/) and then let people write code scripts which can run their experiments on whatever device they want.

Lua is a C based scripting language successfully ported to alchemy: http://code.google.com/p/lua-alchemy/. I must admit though I do prefer coding in Basic. And Psychologists are used to this too, using e.g. Eprime (http://www.pstnet.com/eprime.cfm) which uses what they call Ebasic but what I thiiiiink is actually IWBasic from ionic wind (http://www.ionicwind.com/ ; do IWBasic and ThinBasic share source code BTW?).

Would you guys let me port ThinBasic to Alchemy to allow Psychologists to conduct research? I would embed ThinBasic in a shell to sort out the downloading of scripts to devices and uploading of results etc. This would all be free for Psychologists.

Cheers,
Andy.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Andy,

thanks for your interest in ThinBASIC. Could you please give us more info on how the embedding process works?
Is it simple shelling of ThinBASIC interpreter from main application, or does it involve more complex tasks?

ThinBASIC itself is currently native Windows application, using it on Linux would involve running it through WINE (http://www.thinbasic.com/community/showthread.php?8721-Another-Linux-Ubuntu-and-thinBASIC&highlight=wine). To be fair using ThinBASIC under Linux is currently not our priority, so although some member of forums do try running TB on Linux, it is not something we would devote so much care and passion as we do on Windows.

The possibly interesting functionalities of ThinBASIC for you could be strong graphic library (allowing both 2D/3D) and advanced sound functionalities (sound can be flat mono, stereo or 3D with EAX, as long as hardware supports it). Could serve well for visual and audio stimulation of tested subjects.

If you could tell us a little more on how do the tests typically look like (or what would be the typical use scenarios), it would be interesting and it would allow me to give more details regarding suitability of ThinBASIC.

Regarding syntax similarity to EBASIC - I think the core functionality, like program flow and variable declaration, are quite similar. ThinBASIC ships with huge amount of example code in ThinBASIC/SampleScripts/ to give better idea. The specialized functions for graphics, sound, networking, file handling, internet and many other areas are provided via modules, which are quite ThinBASIC specific, so there I expect the main differences.

The functionality which is not present can be added to the language using so called "user modules". These are DLLs written in C, FreeBASIC, PowerBASIC or for example MASM, which expose functions to ThinBASIC via few intuitive interface commands.


Petr

[omarpta]

Wine for ARM processors has one information wiki link:
http://wiki.winehq.org/ARM

Omar

[omarpta]

WINE for ARM processors wiki: http://wiki.winehq.org/ARM