Ionicwind (Aurora, EBasic) uncertain future ?

[ErosOlmi]

http://www.ionicwind.com/forums/index.php/topic,1820.0.html

[kryton9]

Yep sorry to see that, but what can you do. I think he has been under lots of stress with work and such, probably the best for him to shut her down and concentrate on his family as he wished, can't blame him for that.

[Michael Hartlef]

That announcement make me smile. :) I knew it was happening. This is the second time he is kicking his userbase in the but. I will swallow the rest of my comment about this because it is something that people don't wanna hear anyway.

[ErosOlmi]

Well, this is the second time users following dev environ from Paul remain in the dust.
Maybe first time it was not 100% Paul fault but in any case he sold the company and the products.

It starts to be a kind of ... "behave format".

[Michael Hartlef]

Tom? Second time? Or did you ment Paul?

[José Roca]

His name is Paul, not Tom.

As Mike says, it was a "morte annunciata".

What's next? The Sunrise compiler :)

[ErosOlmi]

Yes, sure, sorry :-[.
I was thinking at Paul and Tom at the same time.

[Michael Hartlef]

His name is Paul, not Tom.

As Mike says, it was a "morte annunciata".

What's next? The Sunrise compiler :)



ROFL, I like that. Morty annunciata sounds so cool.

Can you translate this in spanish for me? And Eros to italian?

The guy who broke the camels back.

[Petr Schreiber]

Mike,

I can serve only with spanish, but I left highschool some years ago so I can't guaranteee precision of translation:


- El hombre que ha roto la espalda de camello

or

- El individuo que rompió la espalda del camello


;D

Bye,
Petr

[José Roca]

"morte annunciata" is Italian. In Spanish it will be "muerte anunciada"; in English "Death foretold"; in French "mort annoncée"; in German "angekündigten Todes".

[José Roca]

Sorry, I have misunderstood you.

The guy who broke the camels back.

Spanish (from Spain): El tipo que le rompió la joroba al camello.

"guy" is an informal word, and in Spain we will use "tipo" or "tío". In other Spanish speaking countries probably they will use another word. "Hombre" or "individuo" are too formal for this sentence.

[Petr Schreiber]

Perdona,

yo he olvidado a "tío" completamente !
Y veo que mi composición de sentencia necesita "tweak" ( arreglar ? ) tambien.

Back to school :-[ :)


Bye,
Petr

[José Roca]

The languages that come from Latin are difficult because they have many subtleties. While the English-speaking guys use "back" for humans and animals (including camels), we use "espalda" for humans and "lomo" for animals, but for camels is funnier if you use "joroba".

[Michael Hartlef]

Thanks guys, I will use the spanish version. It just sounds so cool. ;D

[ErosOlmi]

Mr. Bob Zale, owner of PowerBasic Inc, is preparing a special promotional sales for registered Aurora or EBasic users:
http://www.powerbasic.com/support/forums/Forum12/HTML/004684.html

[kryton9]

Interesting to see names I am familiar with at ionicwind forums also on the powerbasic forums.
It will be interesting to see what price they come up with to bring in customers not used to paying big bucks for a language.
It is good for powerBasic and also good for those abandoned. Maybe someone will snap it up as Tom did with ibasic.

Two good start on products there, one c syntax and the other basic, cross platform mostly done, OOP in both languages... so it should be worth
something I would think?

[Michael Hartlef]

Great! This is so cool. They will find a professional supported compiler. :)


Two good start on products there, one c syntax and the other basic, cross platform mostly done, OOP in both languages... so it should be worth
something I would think?

Kent, The PowerBasic crew didn't say they want to buy off IonicWind. They will just make an offer for existing users. Or did I missunderstood you?

[kryton9]

Mike, I think just miscommunicated. I was saying that those 2 products are still worthy and could be bought. I have not read, heard or even had any rumor of any such sale or offer. Just a thought.

I did read somewhere and can't verify as I was not a partner developer, that I guess the idea was if Paul ever dropped development, or something happened to him, the partner developers could carry on, to avoid what happened with ibasic. I have not heard from the Partner Developers on any of the forums, so this is not official but something I read on either coding monkeys or the pure basic site. I just have a feeling these languages will go on one way or another, that is will not end in October.

But clearly Paul should step away right now and get his life in order. His comments and actions are not in his character, and the stress has gotten to him and clouding his judgments. He should assign the forum moderators and partner developers to carry on the site till October and Paul should act as if the site was already closed to see how his life goes. Then by October maybe his head will be clear enough to think in a rational and well thought out way.

Someone asked him what he would like to see happen. He mentioned he would like to do what he is doing, developing these languages and making a living from it. In response there were 2 great posts with business recommendation for him on the ionic wind forums from 2 different members. Both were very well thought out and made a lot of sense and clearly a direction he should try to make his dream possible. He just snubbed those well thought out posts of concern, clearly a sign he is not thinking clearly and under the control of the stress monster. I hope one of the partner developers steps in and tells him to go take a break, forget about it all. Let them handle the forums and support for now.

[kryton9]

I am sure you guys got emails too, but seems like Paul made a decision that puts him at rest. I hope it works out for him. He is doing some really neat things and offers a real nice alternative. Hope he can now focus get things finished in good time and get his life back the way he wants.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi,

it seems EBASIC goes free:
http://www.ionicwind.com/

Here some info:
http://www.ionicwind.com/forums/index.php/topic,1826.0.html


Bye,
Petr

[ErosOlmi]

Yes,

I'm EBasic customer so I get official email from Paul.
Seem now I have no excuses to develop serious thinBasic SDK for EBasic (and possibly for Aurora even if I'm not sure it will be possible). Quite sure users base using those two compilers will grow a lot.

What I do not really like of EBasic (and previously for IBasic) is the way they hadle strings. They are fixed len and null terminated, more or less what they are in C. One of the best advantages of the BASIC over all other languages is the dynamic way to handle string so why not moving to a more advanced one like OLE strings (or BSTR like they are called in MSDN documentation). thinBasic uses OLE strings and they are easy to manage, dynamic, fast and powerfull !

I tried in the past to make a post asking for real dynamic strings in IonicWind forum but Paul (plus some of his dolphin users following same philosophy) were against me on that telling me that kind of data is not needed.

Regards
Eros

[Petr Schreiber]

Hmm,

I would also not like fixed length strings as only option, I am very comfortable with PB/tB string handling now.


Bye,
Petr

[kryton9]

I know that strings are a big topic on forums... For some reason I can't see the difference. Why are there so many different ways to handle what should be an easy thing as a string? After all when you read about Strings they are just arrays?

[ErosOlmi]

Yes, all in memory is just a sequence of bytes. Problems come when you need to handle that bytes. For example on strings, imagine making a MID$ or a LEFT$ or a concatenation. They seems easy to be done but in reality are quite complex and if not correctly managed, can be also quite slow.

Now, on C strings. They are supposed to end when a NULL char is encountered even if the total allocated memory is much more. Here you add a specific rule. String ends when a NULL is encountered. What if you need to store NULLs into that string? All the functions working on that kind of strings will not be valid in this case.

While dynamic OLE strings can hold any sequence of bytes because the real lenght of the string is a LONG (4 bytes) data stored just in front of the real string data. OLE strings are in reality a pointer to a sequence of bytes. Just substract 4 at that pointer and you can get the number of bytes stored.
OLE strings are used in COM interfaces.

In any case, in my eyes a BASIC language cannot be defined BASIC language if strings are handled like in C.

Just my opinion of course.

[kryton9]

Is this a rule to maybe understand it. If a string is dimensioned with the length, that is the way of traditional Basic, but in C there is not length, just a null terminator?

Basic: DIM A$(9) or DIM A$ AS STRING * 10

C: String A$;

[ErosOlmi]

IN PowerBasic or thinBasic
DIM MyString AS STRING
and you have all the power to allocate any size up to 2Gb full of whatever you prefer.
DIM MyFixString AS STRING * 10 is a fixed string that, under PowerBasic or thinBasic, can contains any type of char.

In C you do not have string data type but a pointer to a char. Than you have to allocate the needed memory using one of the many way to allocate heap memory. In any case if you use aone othe C function in place to handle *Char (pointers to char) the will check the NULL terminator to understand if string is finished.

In any case you can use Microsoft API to manage OLE string, but in this way you will have code that will work only on Microsoft systems.
That's why PowerBasic and thinBasic are Microsoft only related.

[kryton9]

Thanks Eros, the closest I have come to understanding "Strings under the hood" or "strings at lower level".