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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; '...

At this stage the operators :++ (increment) and :-- (decrement) were added. These operators always start with a colon to avoid ambiguity. Example of an increment statement: my_value:++; will increment my_value by 1. Some pointer specific built-in procedures accept a trailing increment / decrement op...

Currently, structures (aka user-defined types) are being implemented. Structures in Sharp BASIC work the same as in most other languages. The following example has been compiled and run successfully. The next step is to implement nested structures. ' SharpBASIC structure 1 ' ---------------------- i...

Sharp BASIC supports jump statements, which would be equivalent to BASIC's goto . However, in Sharp BASIC the keyword for this statement is jump . The statement allows for an immediate jump to a label, but only inside subroutines or functions. Labels start with the symbol @ immediately followed by ...

This stage is a major milestone in the development of the Sharp BASIC compiler. After implementing string assignment and passing managed by a reference count system, the final step of string support is concatenation. With assignment and passing in place, this was relatively easy. Example of concaten...

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Example of a variable-length string passed as const. Contrary to passing a constant string as const (which references the constant string), passing a variable or fixed length string as const actually passes a copy of the string: decl func test1(const v:str):str; const c = "hello world"; di...

These stages were problematic. Due to a change in string reference counting, several string routines in the system library had to be partially rewritten. At the same time, support for the cref (constant reference) parameter qualifier was dropped because of too much complexity at the current stage. R...