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1. No, unfortunately due to lack of time the first beta of the compiler has been delayed. 2. The compiler is currently being developed in FreeBASIC/C and NASM. But eventually SB should become a self-hosting compiler. 3. Pascal is a very structured language, but somewhat verbose and inconsistent at t...

During the previous stage, full support for records was implemented. See the documentation . From a compiler perspective, records are also at the base of structures and tables. Structures or user-defined types (UDT's) are well-known in many programming languages and during this stage, support for st...

Further support has been added for buffer types and records. Sharp BASIC now supports functions of a user-defined type (currently fixed-length records, but structures will be fully supported too). See the documentation about functions . Implementation of user-defined types usually goes hand in hand ...

A buffer type was introduced last year, but it was limited to access by pointer. Some features have been added to make it easier and more flexible to work with buffers as placeholders for data: - the function cbuf copies data types to a buffer. buffer = cbuf(string) whereby an optional parameter can...

The documentation forum has been removed. Instead, you are encouraged to check out the documentation wiki: https://sharpbasic.com/wiki/doku.php, the central place where documentation is being updated.

Support for file handling is being added to the Sharp BASIC language. The first step is support for text files. In addition, support will be added for binary files and the good old random access file. With the introduction of file handling, a new datatype is added: the handle type hnd , which is use...

Due to lack of time I have not been able to work on the compiler for some time, but I intend to continue as planned. In this stage, the character datatype has been (temporarily) removed because of too much complexity in conjunction with the string datatype. Since Sharp BASIC has fixed length strings...

The recent support for shortcut operators (stages 96-97) has a positive effect on the Sharp BASIC language overall. Not only did it improve the loop-statement (see stage 98), it also allowed for a for-statement with an acceptable syntax, something we've been struggling with for months. A C-like for-...

The new shortcut operators (see stages 96-97) allow for a more flexible and readable loop statement, so flexible in fact that Sharp BASIC's count statement (aka the for-loop) has almost become superfluous and certainly "ugly" (keep in mind this is still pre-alpha stage). Consider the follo...

Next to the increment (:++) and decrement (:--) operators (see stage 96), Sharp BASIC supports the 'shortcut' assignment operators :+ (addition), :- (subtraction), :* (multiplication) and :/ (division). Example: dim a:int=5; main do a:+5; ' equivalent to "a = a + 5;" print(a); ' 10 a:-3; '...