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Fuze Basic - First Impressions

Root / Programming Questions / [.]

seggiepantsCreated:
I was also recently spurred in to trying again. Found my previous game from September to be broke, because of how one specific type of command was handled, and had to dig through and fix it all up again. Grrr! I submitted it yesterday, but am still waiting for approval before I get to post the key. Seems that, either, weekends are going to go un-approved, or they don't have the heart to tell me that my commented gripe at the top isn't ever going to get approved!!! Ho-hum.. P.S. your code works just fine!

Thanks for checking that my code works. They do seem rather cavalier about making breaking changes. It sounds like there is some by reference/by value parameter passing trouble in some of the code. I also heard they don't really deallocate memory when not used (ouch). I still spy on their forums and saw that some people were worried about future breaking changes for the showcase programs, they didn't necessarily want to keep updating them indefinitely. I think they do all the approvals manually so if it takes a day or two I wouldn't be too surprised especially over a long weekend. They sure didn't like it when I said they were a BASIC variant. Hopefully your comment doesn't get similar ire.

FuzeBasic was originally a Basic, but Fuze4Switch is based off a "totally" different language, which isn't entirely dissimilar, but is frustratingly different in all the most annoying of places. It's like someone took BASIC, and then broke it, just so they could claim it's not BASIC. I have my assumptions that there's a very good reason for them wanting to stamp out any possible connection between this version and previous editions, mostly down to licensing. So, yes, this is definitely not BASIC, although if it were me, I'd've gone with "Different name BASIC" rather than "Fuze Definitely-Not-BASIC"

Yes, "totally" different. I assumed they didn't want it called BASIC for three reasons. The first is to sound hip and modern instead of old and clunky, the second is to avoid the stink of GOTO that BASIC has all over it, and the third being to differentiate themselves from SmileBasic, I hadn't thought of any licensing problems, I thought anyone was free to make their own BASIC variant. Unfortunately for them BASIC has had bunches of variants over the years and despite them Frankenstein-ing in some syntax from other languages, the difference between FuzeBasic and Fuze4 is evolutionary not revolutionary. So if one is a Basic variant, so is the other one. While some of the additions are very nice. They broke some of the fundamental things like PRINT, and INPUT and are totally missing the Read Eval Print loop or any sort of debugger. For an education focused company, it is very disappointing to be missing some of those fundamental things as it makes the system a terrible place to start learning to program. They don't seem to be able to handle negative feedback well at all, and will misuse their position on the forum to try to "manage" the message which is fundamentally chilling and disturbing. But, at least the keyboard works properly now, and they seem to let a few print commands come through without an explicit update call.