Just BASIC

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JustBASIC Screenshot

Just BASIC is a dialect of the highly popular BASIC programming language of the 1970's for 32-bit Windows computer systems. It's the freeware sister project to Liberty BASIC, popular since 1995. It allows you to create programs with a comprehensive tutorial, help files and a message board.

1 Syntax
2 The GUI interface
3 Compiling
4 Difference between Liberty BASIC and Just BASIC
5 External links

[edit] Syntax

As the title suggests and most BASIC dialects are, the syntax is very simple and easy-to-learn. Programmers have found it is extremely effective in creating programs and even games because of this. Below is a list of some simple commands:

print - Outputs text to the screen
GOTO - Instructs the computer to jump to another point in the computer program, specified by a label.
let - Allows the programmer to make one variable equal to another or do mathematical calculations

Note: It is not required to use the 'let' command before changing a variable. "let v$ = "hello"" OR "v$ = "hello"".

Here is the "Hello World" program in Just BASIC

Print "Hello World" end

[edit] The GUI interface

Just BASIC also allows for the construction of GUI interfaces. It also comes with Freeform-J a WYSIWYG editor for just this purpose. FreeForm-J is the sister of Liberty BASIC's original FreeForm, which is now a community open-source project.

[edit] Compiling

Just BASIC automatically compiles the active program on running. To distribute a program, the programmer must tokenize a program, which compiles the active program into bytecode. The tokenized file is executed by the included runtime engine, which is named jbrun101.exe in the current v1.01 release.

[edit] Difference between Liberty BASIC and Just BASIC

Here are some differences between Just BASIC and Liberty BASIC:

Liberty BASIC supports API calls
Liberty BASIC has custom dialogs for fonts, colors, and the printer
Liberty BASIC has a POPUPMENU that implements a right-click menu
Liberty BASIC has an internal SORT command
Liberty BASIC costs $49.95 for the gold version, or $29.99 for the silver version, which doesn't allow you to compile a program.
Liberty BASIC's IDE has a "quick jump" feature that lets you quickly jump to a label or function
Liberty BASIC supports an add-on toolset called Assist (http://www.libertybasic.com/assist.html), which includes extra tools such as project management, profiling, source code versioning, colored source diffing, and more. This add-on is $49.95.

However, many enhancements to Just BASIC can be done by VBScript. The code for these enhancements can be found at the Just BASIC forum (see below for link).

The download size is about 2.5MB.